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Blogging vs. Social Networking

The Karmic Cycle seems to have turned a bend. Earlier into 2007, bloggers pitching Facebook, no need to glorify them by names, used to tell us that we should turn from blogging and use social networking sites to further our careers by meeting and influencing (read: poking) new people on the social network sites.

For a while, we took to it gladly - substituting commenting below other blog posts with poking, scrapbooking, subscribing to useless applications, among other things.

We used to find at least some solitary meaning with writing a blog post that few read, and giving thoughtful responses (ok, sometimes, plain silly) to fellow bloggers’ posts.

We understood the time and effort fellow bloggers took to pen their thought.

I can’t say, I have had the same understanding feel take over me when I am browsing my social networking profiles – some sort of a weird email meets spam meets needless feel takes over and I have had enough of having to log in to 15 different social networking sites every time I get a message.

Blogging was never that much of a nuisance.

I don’t make my living off blogging – as things stand, my annual earnings from blogging will barely pay a one ticket to see my parents in Bihar. But I like the power of blogging, the new voice that it has provided me with.

I may get few or no comments for my posts but that is better than what I get on social networking sites.

I don’t get the importance of knowing friends from past who have ceased to matter at this point of my life.

I have tried but I still see no dignity in barging into other guys’ profiles and spam them with links and putting tons of links in my profile.

Truman Capote was sometimes known to pay people to praise his writing when Truman was in the company of influential people. What Capote did was more elegant than what we do today to make a statement for who we are.

Maybe, Danah Boyd or some other equally intelligent person will do a study on “Links and Dignity”.

Coming back to blogs, I can show this post to a prospective recruiter, venture capitalist, etc. to show my web 2.0 chops, if you can pardon my arrogance even for a brief while.

That bit about my liking Ritwik Ghatak films, which I have mentioned on my social networking profile means nothing to the recruiter guy.

Moreover, unlike a social networking site, you blog is really your own, and this is true for hosted applications like blogger.com, wordpress.com among others.

All you get for your social networking activity is SPAM and much, much less control over your data.

Someday, some bright kid might turn blogs into social networking tools.

Till then, my dear friends, don’t loose heart, plug your posts on your social networking profiles and blog on!

Labels: blogging, facebook, social networking, trends, web 2.0

posted by Pramit Singh @ 3:38 PM