Is Blogging Dead?

I found an interesting post on the Read/WriteWeb blog, entitled “Is Blogging Dead?”

While blogs are certainly cooling off from a hype perspective, and I’m sure there is no shortage of two-reader blogs (the blogger and his mom) among the estimated 70M blogs online today, are blogs dead, or even dying? Frankly, the idea hadn’t even occurred to me, much less the argument that social networking sites would be their demise.

Sure, I’ve setup accounts on numerous social networking sites (e.g., MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp, Twitter, and in the past, Classmates). While I know many people use social networking for posting blog entries (e.g., on MySpace it’s done frequently), to me that’s usually in a more personal context (e.g., “I’m going out to this club tonight”) and not a professional one. Of all the 80+ RSS/Atom feeds that I read regularly for work purposes, not a single one comes off a social networking site.

So while I see a theoretical conflict, in practice, I don’t see an actual one.

Here’s an excerpt:

There are many other reasons, apart from being social, that people may want to blog. One is to focus on a niche and essentially treat it as a media website, which is what we do here on Read/WriteWeb.

This is exactly what I do on this blog as well — treat it as media site; Dave’s op-ed “column” on the Internet, if you will.

More:

Another reason is to join a distributed conversation about shared interests – usually a half social, half work activity. Newbie blogger Marc Andreessen’s blog is probably of that type, as he wrote about today in his Eleven lessons learned about blogging, so far post.

I agree on the conversational aspect of blogs, but organically this blog has not generated much commentary. Perhaps it’s my lecture-oriented style. (Could it be that I’m perceived as opinionated and wouldn’t listen?) So while I think active commentary is a great plus on any blog, I don’t think it’s required for a blog’s success (e.g., I’ve had over 10K visits/feed hits this month — so people are reading, they’re just not commenting). If anyone dares to say why, I’d love to hear about it.

I’d recommend reading the Andreessen “eleven lessons” post, especially if you’re an aspiring blogger. And here’s an interesting post that replies to Andreessen’s thoughts on comments.

Finally, I discovered this post on blogging (Is Blogging Passe?) as well and wanted to comment on it — but the site’s gone down so I can’t read it. Ergo for now, I’ll just link to it and if I have interesting thoughts later once it’s back up, then I’ll return and revise this paragraph — a capability, I’d add, which is just one of the many nice things about blogging!