The Blog is Dead, Long Live the Blog!

The Blog is Dead, Long Live the Blog!

Over the weekend, The New York Times proclaimed that blogging is dead.  I guess with their vast experience working with dead and dying media, they’d probably be able to recognize a fellow dinosaur headed for an early grave…

All kidding aside, they’ve hit on something.  The days when everyone and their brother gets into blogging are probably over.  A year or two ago many “blogging gurus” would tell us that “we’re all media now”.  The truth of the thing is that most of us don’t have that stuff in us.  It’s one thing to configure wordpress and throw up a few posts, and quite another to update the thing on a regular basis.

I’d know, I’ve been doing this since 1995 or so.  I’ve been through a few cycles where I lost steam, and the post volume slowed to a crawl.  I’ve also setup hundreds of blogs for other people, and honestly, I will tell you right now, I cannot tell at the outset of any project who will be part of the magic 25% that are still updating their blog 6 months later.  And in that other 75% a good portion never update after the first week.

The important thing here is that blogging has gone from being ultra-kewl to being one more electronic communication means with it’s own pros and cons. Very useful for somethings and utterly useless for others.

The days of blogging to be cool are over.  Time for all the gurus and SMDBs to check out and head onto the next big thing, whatever that is.

Yes, comments have virtually dried up over the past year or so on many blogs.  Yes, most of the discussion about my posts now goes on in my Facebook account, away from the mainstream.

It makes blogging no less important.  Think of the blog as your personal long tail.  It is the bit of you that is indexed in Google, that unique bit that is both an opening of yourself to the world at large, as well as a living record of your life online.

Think of the blog as what it was when we invented the thing, a simple online journal. Forget what the gurus tell you, you don’t have to “be the expert.” Being yourself is good enough…and often that’s the part of your blog we like the most.

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