Around six month back, I wrote a blog post “What you need to learn from Valleywag’s blogger?” and I guess, history has repeated itself. This time, Andrew Keen has replaced Paul Boutin but the theory remains the same i.e. “blogs are dead“. Yawn!! Yawn!!
Andrew has taken up the comments of Matt Mullenweg -
“Blogs will become aggregation points, they will become our personal hub. Places where we store all our personal media content such as our flickr photos and Twitter posts.”
Good thing with Andrew’s post is that he’s not just spoken about Blogging in general, however has commented on how blogging is evolving itself. Although, he doesn’t seem to agree with what Matt has to say about blogging.
Although, I agree to Matt and have similar thoughts – however there are other few things that I would like to add, however before that I would like to take the excerpt from WikiPedia that tells us that what exactly is a blog -
A blog (a contraction of the term weblog) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
Keeping the above definition in mind, I’ll discuss this particular topic and will discuss the future of blogs and blogging in detail. I’ll will try to bring some factual side of it to support my statements. Most of the guys are now saying that blogs are dead and believe that social networking websites is something that’ll rule the web.
“regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video” – Is it possible in Facebook? The answer is YES. So, can’t we say that Social networking websites are just another form of blogging and Facebook like sites are just another tool like blog softwares? So that means, we can call ‘your personal facebook profile’ as ‘your personal blog’. With all that, it means that Personal blogging is not dead!
That was one side of blogging i.e. personal blogging. Then we have another side of blogging and that is business blogging and when we talk about that, it really becomes a vast topic to discuss. I would love to keep it short and will try to explain it in one shot itself – Blogs are now used by Fortune 500 companies, major publications, business schools and just about every one else you may think of. Guess what, even politicians maintain a blog to ensure that they can communicate with their readers with ease. So, can we say that Blogs are dead? I guess the answer will be NO.
Talking about factual information. Technorati comes up with State of the Blogosphere and they’ve posted some really nice facts as well. Here i’ve brought just a tiny part of it -
Blogs are here to stay.. Bloggers have been at it an average of three years and are collectively creating close to one million posts every day. Blogs have representation in top-10 web site lists across all key categories, and have become integral to the media ecosystem.
If we can say that both the forms of blogging exist then how can we say that blogs are dead? The question arises though, what will be the future of blogs, will they continue to evolve like this or will there be a point when we’ll experience the saturation. I personally believe that blogging is going to stay and will stay forever, in one form or the other. Blogs are just tools that empower a user to publish their ideas, events, happenings etc. and if we are talking about tool, then they’ll surely evolve and will take a different shape, however if we are talking about blogging then it is always going to be there.
What are your thoughts about the same? Do you think blogs are dead, if so – then I would welcome you to discuss this topic in detail with us in whatever way you want to discuss. If you tend to agree to what I feel, then you are invited for a cup of coffee at my place :)
I might have to agree that personal blogging might go down the road but business blogging may be here to stay.
Well, I think even personal blogging is not going anywhere. It'll be there but just in an evolved form called “social networks”. Would you mind having a personal domain name where all the activity around social stuff (much like Friendfeed) will be displayed automatically?
I'm sure many will love to do that..
Well, as we can see now blogging became a boom in the internet. Blogging is done by people of different status in life and they post their insights about things. Some even made money out of it haha. I think blogging helped a lot especially through the tough times in the US.