Somebody tell Novedge – Blogs Are Dead

Someone made a comment here a few days ago, and then I heard the same thing from a different source yesterday that “blogs are dead”. Of course this was in response to my observation that many of the SolidWorks blogs have floated into inactivity. Of course I never got that memo, and I’m not one to follow trends anyway, so I’m still here blogging away. Ignorance is bliss, they say.

So I head over to my favorite CAD news aggregator, Novedge, and I’m surprised to see blog posts written today on every topic except SolidWorks: Autodesk, Revit, Robot Overlords, Python, Rhino, Creo, The future of PLM,  3D printing, the release of ST4… Blogs from journalists, marketing types, independent whack jobs, consultants, enthusiasts, you name it.

So are blogs really dead? It doesn’t look that way to me. They might be out of favor with social media “experts”, but blogs are not driven by social media experts. They are driven by folks like you and me who have independent voices. I’ve had a web presence of one type or another since 1995, when your average social media expert was still checking out hotties in homeroom. I’ve done my stint on facebook, and decided it wasn’t for me. Twitter – can you say “noise”?!? G+? (click here for an invitation) I’m using it, and like it better than Twitter or Facebook, but it’s not the place for long form.

Oh, long form is dead too? I’m the kind of guy who reads books with more than 500 pages and are printed on paper. I’ve got an ereader, and use it for PDF files, but I read real books too. Long form is not dead. Juvenile attention spans are dead. That doesn’t effect long form at all.If you’re looking for teenagers’ habits to predict the future of media, you’d be more accurate looking to 4chan.org, saying that pidgin Japanese is the language of the future, and all science will be masturbatory science in the next 15 years. But let’s not go there.

Blogs are dead? No, just the SolidWorks user blogs. It sounds like statistics are being misapplied again to justify a pet course of action. Not that we’ve heard that before from SolidWorks.