The day the Blogging Died

lsw-x

A long, long time ago
I can still remember
How those weblogs used to make me smile

And I knew if I had my chance
I could make the Googledance
And maybe Technorati for a while

September always made me shiver
My aggregator would deliver
Bad news in my newsfeed
I couldn’t take one more read

I can’t remember if I cried
When he cut me from his blogroll side
But something touched me deep inside
The day the blogging died

Refrain

And they were singing
Bye bye wiki necho or pie
Took my standard to a body
But the body had died

And the good ol’ boys
Drinking kool-aid and lies
Singing this’ll be the way blogging dies.

Verse 2

Did you write some shitty specs
Is the funk in RSS like sex
When it’s version 2.0?

Now do you believe strict XML
Will save us, how ’bout Jon Udell?
And can you teach me
To install Slashcode?

Well I know that you love Six Apart
But I still can’t tell their pix apart
You’re changing hosts again
Man I dig that Mena and Ben

I was a middle-aging writer hack
With a fast connection and a Powermac
But I knew I had popped the stack
The day the blogging died, I started singing

Refrain

Verse 3

Now for ten years we’ve been on the web
The pings to Weblogs never ebb
But that’s not how it’s gonna be

When the Journals come from AOL
With their instant buddy chatroom hell
And a voice that came from you and me

The BigCos all were too distracted
Their CMSes got impacted
The ROI was burned
No sunk costs were returned

And while Lessig read the prior art
Salam Pax posted in the dark
And we remembered Xerox PARC
The day the blogging died, we were singin’

Refrain

Verse 4

Metafilter’s interface like gopher
With a filler thread from a jaded poster
Daypop Top and fallin’ fast

Extensible is just a notion
The players tried for some forward motion
With Pirillo on the sidelines with his chest

The war blog line got stale and old
While Gawker played a snarky role
We all got options then
But we never cashed them in

The VCs tried to take the yield
Installed-base churn did not congeal
Do you recall what extensive usability, quality assurance, and user-acceptance testing revealed
The day the blogging died? we started singin’

Refrain

Verse 5

And there we were all on one net
Three generations lost to debt
With new startups to start again

So, come on Marc be nimble, Dave be quick
Meg where’s Lafayette, hey Nick?
‘Cause Pyra gets the only BlogIt button

And as I watched the TypePad splash
I hoped they had sufficient cash
No business model yet
Makes hosting a safe bet

And as the flames lit up the blogosphere
Chris Lydon lent a kindly ear
I saw RageBoy laughing without fear
The day the blogging died, he was singin’,

Refrain

Verse 6

I met this person, Burningbird,
And I asked her for an ontologically meaningful word
But she just smiled and made a sound

I went down to the Scripting News
Where some years before I’d seen the clues
But the server said the file wasn’t found

In LiveJournals children screamed,
The lovers cried and the poets dreamed
But not a word was trusted
The permalinks were busted

And the three men I admire most,
Phil Wolff, Mark Pilgrim, and Steve Yost
Kept editing their final post
The day the blogging died
And they were singin’ …

Refrain
Repeat Refrain

via Radio Free Blogistan

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4 thoughts on “The day the Blogging Died”

  1. Pingback: Sit Down and Relax Weblog

  2. Heh, this song is a bit dates, especially now that echo/necho/pie is called Atom.

    be sure to look for Pete Hoskins’ award-winning mp3 rendition of the song.

    plus, it’s better with the links. consider copying the source from my original page and pasting that in….

  3. Pingback: If I Blog in the Forest and No One Reads It, Did I Make Any Noise?!?

  4. Pingback: If I Blog in the Forest and No One Reads It, Did I Make Any Noise?!?

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