Blogging isn’t dead, it’s evolving

There’s been a bit of commentary and opinion in recent weeks that blogging (meaning, written content longer than just a paragraph or two) as we know it is dying or even already dead when compared to the rise of Facebook and Twitter (meaning, very short content like the 140-character posts of Twitter).

It started last month with a new Pew Internet survey in America that some commentators suggest shows blogging is in clear decline as a means of popular online expression.

It doesn’t look that way to me from reading Pew’s survey report. On the contrary, blogging isn’t so much on its deathbed as it is on a continuing evolutionary track:

[…] Only half as many online teens work on their own blog as did in 2006, and Millennial generation adults ages 18-33 have also seen a modest decline—a development that may be related to the quickly-growing popularity of social network sites. At the same time, however, blogging’s popularity increased among most older generations, and as a result the rate of blogging for all online adults rose slightly overall from 11% in late 2008 to 14% in 2010. Yet while the act formally known as blogging seems to have peaked, internet users are doing blog-like things in other online spaces as they post updates about their lives, musings about the world, jokes, and links on social networking sites and micro-blogging sites such as Twitter.

That’s the US picture which, I would guess, is credible to project broadly speaking into other geographies such as the UK.

Then consider this picture – hosted blogging service WordPress.com is growing fast with over 6 million new blogs in 2010 and  pageviews up by 53%.

[…] Media uploads also doubled to 94.5 terabytes of new photos and videos, while new posts were up 110% to 146 million. Meanwhile, mobile WordPress blogging is on the up. The company’s userbase for its mobile apps increased 700% to 1.4 million in 2010.

A good indicator to reinforce the credibility of a view that blogging isn’t dead comes from Anil Dash, a man who knows a thing or two about the development and evolution of blogging and who has an interesting perspective on the role of short-form content tools like Twitter:

[…] Twitter and other stream-based flows of information provide an important role in the ecosystem. Perhaps the most important psychological innovation of Twitter is that it assumes you won’t see every message that comes along. There’s no count of unread items, and very little social cost to telling a friend that you missed their tweet. That convenience and social accommodation is incredibly valuable and an important contribution to the web.

However, by creating a lossy environment where individual tweets are disposable, there’s also an environment where few will build the infrastructure to support broader, more meaningful conversations that could be catalyzed by a tweet. In many ways, this means the best tweets for advancing an idea are those that contain links to more permanent media.

“Links to more permanent media” is the bit that especially grabbed my attention. Twitter (and Facebook, for that matter) is a terrific tool to alert your community and others of more fuller content elsewhere. Syndicating your content to your community, in other words.

No, blogging isn’t dead, it’s simply evolving.

Incidentally, the cartoon you see at the top was drawn in early 2005 by Hugh MacLeod. It spectacularly summed up the sentiment of the time about blogging which, six years ago, was social media. There was even a t-shirt.