Seth Godin recently wrote about tech pundit’s declarations of technology dying. Blogging is dead, RSS is dead, the Internet is dead etc.
I agree with Godin’s primary assertion that these declarations are inherently bullshit.
There are amazing blogs. RSS is wonderful. The Internet is alive and helping to facilitate communications in Japan, and pro-democracy uprisings in the Middle East.
Godin’s second claim is only partially correct:
Dead means that they are no longer interesting to the drive-by technorati. Dead means that the curiousity factor has been satisfied, that people have gotten the joke.
These people rarely do anything of much value, though.
Great music wasn’t created by the first people to grab an electric guitar or a synthesizer. Great snowboarding moves didn’t come from the guy who invented the snowboard… No one thinks Gutenberg was a great author, and some of the best books will be written long after books are truly dead.
Les Paul invented the solid body electric guitar and was wizard with it as well. I’m sure there are plenty of other people who created an innovation and continued to do brilliant things with it.
Premature declarations of the death of a technology or industry is a pathetic cry for clicks. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the work done by early adopters and innovators is garbage.
The Geek Whisperer 