Blogging Is Dead. Oh, Really?

You can always tell when it’s been a slow news day. There’s yet another provoca­tive news story, pro­nounc­ing the death of email, or blog­ging, or Twit­ter. You name it.

Sev­eral weeks ago the New York Times wrote that blog­ging among young peo­ple was on the decline, accord­ing to research from the Pew Center’s Inter­net and Amer­i­can Life Project. Later, more thought­ful com­men­taries appeared, not­ing that blog­ging isn’t dead; it is just evolv­ing.

The obser­va­tion I found most per­ti­nent is from GigaOm:

Blog­ging… has evolved into much more of a con­tin­uum of pub­lish­ing

My expe­ri­ence, although far from sci­en­tific, is that blog­ging and tweet­ing have become part of a con­tin­uum of con­ver­sa­tion. Peo­ple choose the means of expres­sion that is most com­fort­able, per­haps most con­ve­nient at the moment — the means that best suits what they want to say — and to whom.

With both my per­sonal blog and my pro­fes­sional blog, I’ve been sur­prised by the num­ber of com­ments that arrive via email rather than as com­ments posted directly in the blog. It takes an extra step or two for some­one to con­tact me by email, rather than Word­Press’ built-in com­ment forms. This sug­gests some­thing about the person’s moti­va­tion.

The more thought­ful the com­ment, or the more it per­tains to the writer’s spe­cific busi­ness issues, the more likely it is to arrive in my email in-box, rather than appear as a pub­lic com­ment on my blog. More than once I’ve found myself encour­ag­ing the comment’s author to share it from within the blog, because I believed it would res­onate with oth­ers.

I also rec­og­nize that, at times, people’s only recourse is to com­mu­ni­cate with me via email, because the oppor­tu­nity to com­ment on a post has expired.

Sadly, I’ve been forced to stop accept­ing blog com­ments within a month or so of post­ing a new entry, to avoid inces­sant spam­ming by the East­ern Euro­pean link farms. Some­how I just haven’t been able to swal­low the need to add a Captcha form, the auto­mated alter­na­tive to fend­ing off the spam­mers.

The fact that spam­mers have become so active says that there’s con­tin­u­ing value in blogs.

And then there was the mes­sage on 2/26 from pro­lific tweeter Jere­miah Owyang:

Tweet more than 20 times a day? You should blog. Pay your­self first.

No, blog­ging isn’t dead: it’s just part of a con­tin­uum of con­ver­sa­tion options.