About the "blogging is dead" meme

No, it ain't. Not yet. But the obsession with blogging as a fad may (mercifully) be fading. Anyway, read this Wall Street Journal column, Blog Epitaphs? Get Me Rewrite, by Jason Fry for a cogent rant on the topic. Hurry; link will go behind a paid subscription firewall.

From the article:

"Within a couple of years blogging will be a term thrown around loosely -- and sometimes inaccurately -- to describe a style and rhythm of writing, as well as the tools to publish that writing."

For what it's worth, I say something very similar in The Corporate Blogging Book.

Another article pondering the "blogging is dead" meme is here in the Washington Post (Feb. 26, 2006).

Comments

[Mike]

Not to pick on you, but why is everyone in such a hurry to kill blogging ?

It isn't going anywhere. Our blogs get content indexed 100 times faster than a static site.

It's still in the early adopters hands and all I see are "Blogging Is Dead" posts.

Do people want to be able to say, "I said it way back when" ?

Well, it may die, but we'll all be gone before it does.

The world knows little of it, as of yet, and it's dead ? I think not.

I said it first...way back now !

[Richard]

This is part of a huge fad of naming and renaming things in the arena of the Internet.

Blogs will still exist, I'm not about to stop any of mine and I've got a healthy supply of readers (as have you Debbie), however the name Blog or Blogging might disappear, and frankly I think that's a good thing.

I'm struggling in the organisation I work in to get new technologies and learning systems even looked at, never mind piloted, and a lot of that is to do with the stigma attached from their Internet uses.

Here's some of the views held by key people I've dealt with:

Blogs = online diaries and a source of arguments, factually incorrect...

Wikis = factually incorrect, source for argument and contention, possible legal cases, administration nightmare...

You know the list goes on and on for these types of technologies, and it will take the restyling of these systems to even make large organisations look into them.

I've found much more interest in the Confluence package as a Wiki against something like MediaWiki, because it's designed for corporate use and it has a serious name. Sounds petty, but it's true.

So perhaps the dropping of the term Blog and all that has gone with it is a good thing.

Does it mean sites will stop? Not at all. Hasn't the Internet already seen the death of dial-up, books, newspapers, telephones, cinema, etc etc...

I'll stop now...I'm ranting.