On last week’s Sinica podcast, host Kaiser Kuo along with Jeremy Goldkorn and Will Moss held a semi-serious wake for the English-language China blogosphere:
The China blog is officially dead, moribund, cadaverous, extinct, buried, bereft of life, defunct and totally-and-utterly-inert. It could even be said to be resting in peace, save for the fact that Will Moss drove a silver stake through its heart before recording this podcast. “We single-handedly made the China blog obsolete,” he joked in our studio after further sawing off its head. But he has a point. Because who reads blogs these days?
Well…true enough. I remarked a few weeks ago at a small gathering of…China bloggers that these days “blogs were essentially repositories for content disbursed and shared via RSS readers and Twitter.” I know that I do much of my blog-reading on Google Reader and I’ll admit that I get irked if I have to click too far to read. If your RSS feed provides the full article, I’m just that much more likely to read your stuff.
While Twitter and the like haven’t completely killed the blog, they have done a number on the state of blog commentary. As many (if not both)
What have I been doing since the Bob Dylan concert in April?
Writing. Teaching. Traveling. And having visions of revolutionary wild fowl.