give the 'net credit

After the released of the the iPad, the Kindle-killer stories were inevitable. There were so many, in fact, that Amazon posted an ad on its homepage touting the Kindle as the best selling item on the site EVER. I don’t want to wade into the debate today. Like most of the articles I’ve read, I think it’s way too early to say.

What I do want to address is why the media and the blogosphere are so fascinated with killing something off when something else comes around? Just last week, I was listening to a podcast I enjoy (TWiT – This Week in Technology) featuring a man I respect (Kevin Rose, founder of Digg.com), but I balked when Rose predicted Twitter had killed blogs. Another guest, and I can’t remember who, said Google Reader and RSS feeds never really had enough life to be killed off by something else.

My first reaction was to wonder if this guy has ever actually used the Internet. I use RSS and Google Reader almost daily. RSS powers many of the news aggregators I follow, including one I’ll be managing soon. There’s even a free program available that allows you to turn any RSS feed into your own personal iPhone app. (Not getting enough Hans? There’s an app for that!)

The more I thought about it, however, the more I started to realize why these two titans of online industry were so misguided. The reason? They are titans of online industry. In other words, they know so much about technology and so many better ways to get news and information they don’t see or understand how others use the ‘Net. Rose especially astounded me because normally I think he gets it. The changes he has proposed for Digg, even though they are a bit late the game, will make the site much more useable and current.

He seemed to think people only used their blogs to share links. If that’s all you’re doing, then Twitter makes sense, but if you are using your blog to share your thoughts and explore your ideas, then you are going to need a lot more than 140 characters. If you are constantly glued to Twitter to see updates as they come in or you don’t really care about individual tweets, then you won’t need RSS to catalog and store posts from friends and organizations you follow. Or maybe he just likes to click, I don’t know.

To prove my point, I tweeted my peeps (that seems an especially a propos word in the Twitterverse), and I didn’t get a ton of responses. The ones I did get, however, were telling. I’m not alone in thinking Rose and his ilk are getting a bit too geeky to understand the common person. One of my former Missouri students Bethany Welcher underscored the need for a blog when she wrote “I have had to reply to you three times just to say what I want.” (I’ve included her entire quote as a graphic above.

I’ll keep blogging and using Google Reader. As much as I’d love to get an iPad, I’m not going to write off the possibilities of the Kindle either. It just doesn’t make sense until I look beyond my own experience and try to understand why someone uses one on his or her own terms.

PhotoCredit: Katsuyuki Namba from Flickr

Popularity: 6% [?]

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.