Gav Reilly

the thoughts of an on/off journalist, web designer and musician, thinking out loud

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Written by Gav

January 6th, 2010 at 12:14 pm

Posted in Blogging, Ireland, Media

Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

9 Responses to 'So that’s blogging dead, then'

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  1. I suspect that Una might be overstating it a little, but there certainly are a lot of Irish bloggers who want to latch onto other gigs and who brand themselves as being an entity.

    Twenty is another, and got a book deal

    I would take issue with this. I was lucky enough to be very much ‘right place, right time’. I never had any grand design, I never started blogging to get another gig, least of all a book deal. It was a by-product of the success of the blog. And I have never ‘branded’ myself (unless you mean hot irons and that’s a different thing altogether).

    Now, of course there have been people who have seen blogging as a way to get ahead in other areas and fair play to them for doing it. Why wouldn’t you, if you could?

    Twenty Major

    6 Jan 10 at 12:22 pm

  2. I’ll have you know, I won that apartment in a poker game.

    Good post though.

    I’d agree to some degree (that rhymes) that the notion of the blogosphere is perhaps in itself a redundent one. Maybe it is. Maybe not. I just lashed out a comment piece in half an hour when Twenty sort of dared me on Twitter on the back of a couple of thoughts I had about blogging. Completely surprised at the reaction it got, people shouldn’t take it so seriously, it’s just one person’s small opinion! Quite amused by it really.

    Luckily there are people like you who are contributing to the debate in a smart way.

    UnaMullally

    6 Jan 10 at 12:28 pm

  3. @Twenty – I didn’t mean to suggest that you started out with some kind of masterplan to make money out of blogging, and apologise if that’s how it comes across.

    My point is that the ‘Twenty Major’ name is now something people consider as a brand that offers the reader an assurance that the content is going to be worth reading. Personally I know I do – even when I’m fed up to the gills of reading criticism of the HSE or politicians in general, when it comes up in my RSS reader as being written by you, I’ll read it anyway because I know it’ll be well written. One might surmise that name recognition could well have been a reason why a publisher decided to offer you a deal. I’m not criticising you at all for it – I bought both books myself though I haven’t gotten to read the second yet – and think you’re a perfect example of cream rising to the top. It’s just that your name now carries an implicit guarantee of quality and it certainly helps your content get read more widely.

    Gav

    6 Jan 10 at 12:28 pm

  4. @Una – I suppose you could take the storm-in-teacup reaction to the post to mean that the Irish blogging community isn’t all that dead and buried yet…

    Thanks for the compliment though. :)

    Gav

    6 Jan 10 at 12:33 pm

  5. You’re way too kind, Gav, but thanks!

    Twenty Major

    6 Jan 10 at 12:37 pm

  6. Good piece I think.

    Blogging in Ireland got too caught up in the idea of a blogoshpere. Rather then people producing content. People will always do blogging as people enjoy doing it. Whether the blogosphere surivies as it was who knows. In many way I hope it doesn’t it bread to much consensus.

    And yes most content is rubbish. All my content is certainly rubbish.

    simon

    6 Jan 10 at 12:51 pm

  7. A truly excellent post, Gav. You’ve pretty much summed up my own attitude to the whole Irish blogging scene.

    The country is, as you say, too small. Access is, as you say, too narrow. Backslapping and mutual congratulations abound. There’s not much room for multiple posts on the same topic, for the simple reason that there isn’t the demand for twenty viewpoints on the same parochial issue. As a matter of fact, it often seems to me that the best discussions in new media are about new media. What does that tell us? That it’s an incestuous entity. A closed circle.

    That may be cause enough for some, even many, to mock it, but there’s so much good to come out of it. It keeps us young folks writing, and, though it’s easy to talk about “wannabes” with disdain (and that’s what we are), there are enough success stories out there to make it worthwhile.

    I’ve slowed down with blogging lately, having been so busy; but I’m not done yet. I like to look at it as the equivalent of a poet’s juvenelia: something which will almost certainly be embarrassing when looked back on, but essential groundwork for a future writing career.

    Dave Molloy

    6 Jan 10 at 4:31 pm

  8. The notion of the romantic and great era of Irish blogging of yesteryear gets on my tits, as do the more and more frequent posts declaring it dead and gone as the author rides off into the sunset, too good for the rest of the peasants left behind.

    It’s not just about the ‘blog awards’, or whether or not we have someone tripping the red carpet feeding us supposedly worthy information about TG4 weather girls, or the emergence of the next cutting edge author or journalist. It’s all that AND what someone had for breakfast, AND whey thy miss their dead dog, AND just enjoying writing a few hundred words a couple of times a week to please yourself.

    If some people think that Irish blogging is dead because it’s too small, it’s because they are not willing to look around them.

    Martin

    6 Jan 10 at 7:46 pm

  9. Hi Gav–

    I’ve come to this discussion very late, so wrapped up in my own blogging clique am I. ;-)

    It seems to me that Una is only seeing blogs through a journalist’s eyes, as if blogs that aren’t breaking news stories or which aren’t keeping people up-to-date about the music scene are a waste of time. But blogging’s forte really isn’t journalism at all; its forte lies in providing an opportunity for voices to be heard that will never make it into the mainstream media or be picked up by publishing houses. It allows anyone, if they want, to produce original material, to have their voice heard, to engage in debates, or simply to express themselves creatively. And if a lot of the ideas expressed are cliched, unoriginal, or awkwardly expressed, so what? It’s better that people try to express ideas and have them debated and developed in discussiomn with others than they be passive consumers of the mainstream media with no right of reply.

    The blogosphere – even the Irish blogosphere – is too diverse to imagine that it doesn’t serve its purpose anymore, simply because it doesn’t have just one purpose. It has loads. Twitter is really a journalist’s tool, and I can see that it makes sense for the journos to migrate to it, but it isn’t the place to develop and express original ideas. Blogging will always let you do that.

    Cheers

    JP

    Prenderghast

    12 Jan 10 at 5:50 pm

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