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By B.L. Ochman
So lemme ask you: with revolution in Egypt, lunatics shooting Senators in Arizona, garbage piled 20 feet high all over New York City, unemployment at all time highs, and the Super Bowl coming up, what kind of editor would run a full-page cover story entitled “The End of Blogging” this week? That’s exactly the lapse in judgement The NY Observer had this week. Personally, I prefer to get my tabloid journalism from TMZ.

Blogging, for chrissake, is alive and well. Twitter, Quora, Facebook et al help bloggers who have an interesting and/or unique view to spread their ideas. There’s no shortage of well-read blogs, and new ones crop up all the time.

Microblogging and Facebook produce enormous volumes of disposable headlines. While tens of thousands of Tweets stream hourly, blogs create a permanent respository for thoughts and ideas – the best of which spread through Tweets and Facebook wall posts.

The blogging is dead, Twitter is dead, social media is dead, Internet is dead headline is too easy to write – and a cheap shot. Blogging not going away any time soon.

That said, blogging is hard work. Most people who start blogs abandon them because they find out they don’t really have anything to say, and they have no idea how to build up their audience. It’s damn tempting to use 140 character Tweets instead of blog posts to broadcast ideas. Blogs work for expanding on ideas, linking to great content and resources, engaging in conversation with readers, providing a creative outlet space not governed by someone else’s rules. And search engines love the crap out of blogs.

Cartoon by Hugh Macleod, gapingvoid

Bonus Links:
Blogging isn’t dead, it’s evolving
Top 10 reasons your company shouldn’t blog
Top 7 reasons your company should blog
How to have a totally fucking amazing corporate blog