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My good friend and ace thinker Trevor Cook recently highlighted how the ‘blogging is dead’ meme is… well… dead.
Quoting Duncan Riley in a great thought-piece for the Inquisitr: “The Economist’s piece is the better of the two, arguing that the top of the blogosphere is today indistinguishable from the mainstream media.”
Says Trevor,
One truth that has been re-inforced by the last few years of blogging is that it is not easy. Technically, of course, it is no harder than sending an email. But content, dear chap, that is the hard part. Many people can’t write, or don’t feel the need to do it every day, and many people, it turns out, don’t have much to say, or much they want to say to the world at large.
But before you dust off your typing skills, be mindful of a statistic that has never come out before in Technorati’s ‘State of the Blogosphere’ reports; that 94% of blogs have suffered from what is called ‘blogfade’ — no longer updated. That leaves around 1.5 million blogs active over the last seven days, and 7.4 million active over the last four months. A frighteningly low figure, compared to the triumphant hoopla that many (this author included) boasted was around the 133 million mark.
However, whilst blogging may not be as popular an activity as many of us thought it was, it DOES continue to support my feeling (based on decades of evidence) that those who ARE at the forefront of new communication technologies — blogging, podcasting, Twitter, 3D virtual worlds, et al. — are early adopters who have a widely-read/listened to platform on which to evangelise if they believe the product or service will be of benefit to their community. That all of the mainstream media sites now resemble blogs is further evidence that the communication technology called ‘blogging’ has gained a FAR greater audience and associated reach than a mere 133/7.4/1.5 million.
And as Trevor says,
Long-term this is not bad for companies, governments, associations and NGOs which do have a lot to say and important, continuing, reasons for communicating. After all, that’s why they spend a lot of money, sometimes huge amounts, on communications each year.
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