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Drue_Funeral.jpgBlogging is dead. Again. This time, the death knell sounds for the individual bloggers. But, as I said last year: Reports of Blogging’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated.
A recent article in Wired, and then an echo chamber of other posts, declared that the individual blogger is a thing of the past. In fact, my stats show that What’s Next Blog has more readers now than any time in the past seven years.
In a supreme example of link bait, Paul Boutin wrote:

“Scroll down Technorati’s list of the top 100 blogs and you’ll find personal sites have been shoved aside by professional ones. Most are essentially online magazines: The Huffington Post. Engadget. TreeHugger. A stand-alone commentator can’t keep up with a team of pro writers cranking out up to 30 posts a day.”

Magazine Format Blog Posts Overwhelm
And he’s right. A lone blogger can’t keep up with writers cranking out 30 posts a day. But then again, neither can readers.
You will not convince me that anyone reads all of the hundreds of posts published every day on Huffington Post, or most other magazine format blogs. Scores of thousand-word-plus posts, 10-minute videos, seemingly endless podcasts are all too much for anyone to keep up with in our multi-tasking world.
Blogging was also declared dead in 2004, 2006 and again in 2007 when Hugh Macleod said, wisely, “of course you realize this is all crap.”
Concept: Post Only When You Have Something to Say
The individual bloggers I follow: Hugh Macleod, Toby Bloomberg, Chris Brogan, Steve Rubel, Drue Kataoka, Francine Hardaway, Charlene Li, Adriana Lukas, Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, Doc Searls, Dave Winer, Amy Gahran, and a few dozen others, write tight, and they only write when they have some actually new to say. That style of blogging isn’t going anywhere.
Posted by B.L. Ochman
Image: New Orleans Funeral, Drue Kataoka