Blogging is Dead. Long Live the Blog…

‘Is blogging dead?’ is a question that has been fairly consistantly asked pretty much since people started blogging, but here it is again - this time kicked off by prominent blogger Jason Calacanis when he quit blogging in favour of sending out an email newsletter.

In his first email newsletter he asks ‘is blogging dead?’ and answers his own question (tongue in cheek) ‘Yes, it is. Officially’.

He goes on to make some very interesting points about the state of blogging, including discussing how people are putting so much time and energy into promoting their blog posts as well as writing them, and how the quality of blogging is suffering from a desperation to get your blog posts read by as many people as possible. He also briefly looks at how blogging puts you in the public eye to a degree, and as people’s online (and often anonymous) behaviour can be fairly appalling you can end up under attack for things you say or do on your blog.

And so Jason is moving to an email newsletter instead of publishing on his blog. I can understand his motives and I think he makes plenty of valid points - have a read of his full text.

But he doesn’t actually argue that blogs are dead. Just that there are new challenges arising for the ‘blogging community’, and particularly those who are considered successful bloggers… or ‘A list’ bloggers.

That didn’t stop the discussions about the current health of blogging, and whether a flatline was imminent though, and the ever increasingly wise Hugh MacLeod then blogged about whether blogging was dead, where he boiled the whole question down to what blogging has always been about, by quoting Clay Shirky:

the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower

I understand why someone like Jason Calacanis, in his position, would favour moving to an email newsletter, but blogging won’t die that easily. For many small businesses (and large businesses for that matter) blogging is an incredibly useful and simple tool to publish to the online medium - whether you have global aspirations or not. Take this humble blog. I’m not trying to become an A-Lister. I’m not even trying to generate international clients, but I’m generating relevant content on a regular basis. And Google likes that.

Blogging may be undergoing changes, the blogging cluture may need to seriously examine the amount of negativity that prominent bloggers seem to have to deal with, but as long as regular, relevant content = better search results = increased traffic, blogging will live on. In the last month, 70.73% of all traffic came to this site via the blog.

You don’t have to be king of the blogoshpere, you don’t have to sparkle with ingenuity and brilliance in every post and you don’t have to kill yourself over every post and kill yourself a second time flogging said post.

A solid blogging strategy and a level of persistance will reap benefits.