Blogging is Not Dead. Or Dying

Jeremy Zawodny, who blogs for Yahoo!, and is obviously trying to create controversy to expand his readership, says blogging is "gonna peak sooner or later." Should be about five minutes until someone types the headline "Blogging is Dead."

Dave Winer says "I don't think blogging will peak, any more than the telephone will peak. It's a fundamental way of communicating, if it goes away it will be replaced by something exactly like it."

Both decry advertising on blogs, suggesting that the suits will soon take over and ruin the medium. What's dying is traditional advertising, to be replaced with new forms that are not such a direct hit on consumer's heads. Advertising will need to evolve or it will become even more irrelevant.

Advertisers are getting excellent click-through rates on blogs they sponsor, even if those blogs lose some "all ads on blogs are bad" purists as readers.

What's a blog?
Physically, blogs are an interactive, sophisticated content management tool that allows easy and full-featured publishing to the Internet, free of the tyranny of IT dependence.

Content: just as in main stream media and traditional websites, the best content will win the widest audience -- with or without advertising. As the form matures, more people will make a living from blogging. That will lead to ad-supported or subscription blogs.

Philosophically, blogs are a way of engaging in conversation and putting a human face on the writer, whether that's an opinionated citizen journalist or an employee of a mega-corporation like Microsoft or Sun or IBM.

I believe that blogging will change into something that will be unrecognizable, which is what Jeremy Zawodny, I believe, is saying. Less browser-based, more meta and less sourceable, more plastic and flexible and when all is said and done, the net gain will be in underlying technologies such as trackback, pinging, and of course syndication technologies such as RSS, RSS2. and ATOM (and others to come -- RSS3?)