When blogs go silent, do they make sound?

Published by Rags
November 12th, 2007 9:07 pm

This is some what of a follow up to my previous post on contents and their shelf lives. GigaOm reported today that their site took a hit when a ” A truck driver drove into a power transformer in San Antonio, Texas, causing it to explode. That explosion caused major power disruption and took down RackSpace, our hosting company. ”

Om wonders how fragile our Internet infrastructure is if a single truck driver can take down so many sites.

I ask, so what? If million blog posts don’t get posted or get read for a day or two would it matter? Did anyone skip a beat other? What does it tell about the place the new UG media have in our lives? If you didn’t miss them for a day, do you need them the next day?

When blogs stop posting after all there is no one to read them, do they make a sound?

4 Responses to “When blogs go silent, do they make sound?”

  1. Jonathan Street Says:

    It looks like it is more than just blogs. I don’t use any of their services myself but I would imagine a few businesses were having fun with 37Signals down.

    Backups (because they’ll all have backups, right?) will take up some of the slack but they take time to make ready, not completely up-to-date etc.

  2. Nate Says:

    We use 37Signals’ BaseCamp for >play. Good thing this didn’t happen a couple weeks ago…

    Btw, we would use their CRM product if it wasn’t so insanely expensive for academic/non-profit organizations. We’re looking for an affordable relationship management app.

  3. Nathan D Says:

    Perhaps if you value blogs so little you should post less often ;) Blogs with high signal-to-noise are highly valued sources of information. Blogs with random rants are not.

  4. Rags Says:

    I appreciate your comments Nathan.

    The reasoning doesn’t follow.

    When you say “high” and “highly valued”, by what standards? by how many? Even if we assume these are defined, I ca see how you would like to read a blog post that you found through search or an aggrgator on a topic that was of interest to you that day. How many will consistently read the same blog (despite what the RSS subscription numbers say)?
    In any communication what is signal to some is noise to others. On a side note, if you use verizon or sprint mobile phone, that’s exactly how everyone get to have their own phone conversation.

    Blogs by definition are rants (or more benignly blogger’s view of something), random or not,

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