Blogging is not going away

On Monday, a blogger for Valleywag wrote a post on a Wired blog declaring that blogging is dead (or in Valleywag speak, "blogging is so 2004"). I enjoyed in particular reading the reaction to the post, and yesterday afternoon was asked for an opinion on it by one of our clients.I thought I'd share that response here.

Of course, the article has generated voluminous commentary and reaction, all via blogging. The fact that he wrote this article in a blog post and it has generated so much reaction in other blogs pretty much debunks his argument that blogs are dead. I agree with much of the common reaction, which is that his argument is shallow because the evidence he uses is that Jason Calacanis retired from blogging and Robert Scoble uses Twitter and Friendfeed more now than his own blog. If Calacanis and Scoble don't value blogging anymore, then it must be dead! I don't think so.

I also think that this blog post is a classic example of link bait. Write a provocative article that blogging is dead, extol the virtues of all the currently most popular shiny new objects, and you’re sure to get thousands of other people linking to you to increase views, upon which most professional bloggers’ pay is based. Many people fell for it. I'm with Seamus McCauley and won't link to it either.

Blogging is not going away. It still will have a place for companies, in particular because they can serve their own buying communities very well with thoughtful, informative content related to the problems they are trying to solve. For B2B companies, these audiences are targeted and fairly well-defined and don’t need to worry about competing with Huffington Post or TechCrunch or even Valleywag for eyeballs. The other point is that the use of social media technologies is not an either/or scenario.  Blogging has its purpose for longer-form communication, whereas Twitter, Facebook and Flickr serve different purposes. They should be used in a very complementary and cohesive way, as we do with our blog (see the FriendFeed widget in the left sidebar).

This is a discussion that is sure to continue. What do you think?