Jeffrey Zeldman talks about the demise of the personal website:

In the past 5 years or so we have witnessed a change in how people manage their personal websites. 10 years ago people tried hard to show-off with self-consciously cool websites, or odd little pages with hard to read text about their cat on garish backgrounds. Then came blogging were people wrote about their cats every day, but it was still on ‘their site’. Now we’re seeing people feel much less importance in the ownership of their space. MySpace was possibly the start of this trend, but now with Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, Flickr, YouTube, etc., keeping your own personal space online just seems like too much hassle now.

What Zeldman does not discuss is that this is happening increasingly with companies and organisations too. Whether they have a Facebook page, a corporate Twitter account, video on YouTube, an eBay account for ecommerce, Amazon S3 for storage or tools like Basecamp, Salesforce and Google Documents for their intranets, the de-centralisation of organisations is happening, and we regularly recommend this for clients.

Jakob Neilsen argues that for certain organisations or people, it is better to avoid quickly written blog entries (like this!), and concentrate on longer more in-depth articles. It’s an interesting article, but not for everyone. Various good discussions have been started on the topic, and are worth scanning at The Guardian and Robert Scoble’s blog, who takes it almost personally. We primarily write short posts on subjects that we find relevant to our business and our clients. We would at times like to write longer posts, but find that not only do we not have the time, we also want to be as succinct as possible.