"Experts" pronounce "Blogging is Dead." But I wouldn't know about that...

...there's been a lot of clatter throughout the blogosphere over the last several weeks, and rest assured it is not giving any tangible proof to those mourning the death of the blog. But the New York Observer has proclaimed blogging is finished, so we should all snap our laptops and netbooks shut, and just cut it out entirely!

If the freedom from the opinion-based aggregation model has freed blogs of their point of origin, and less savory aspects, the short-form personal blog may well encourage longer extracurricular writing. In Wired last month, Clive Thompson argued just this point. "Ten years ago, my favorite bloggers wrote middle takes—a link with a couple of sentences of commentary—and they'd update a few times a day. Once Twitter arrived, they began blogging less often but with much longer, more-in-depth essays," he wrote. And when someone does decide to weigh in on Mr. Olbermann in a substantive way on a personal blog, à la Sady Doyle on Tumblr, the networking aspects of the new blog formats ensure that the post will be read. ~ The New York Observer, "The End of Blogging"

The comments are the most sensible part of the Observer article!

WHATEVER! The Observer piece was perhaps intended to spark dialogue: besides me, Nicholas Jackson has responded with a post on The Atlantic: too bad Jackson didn't have much to add to the discussion!

We couls always go back to 2009 and read Blogging is Dead (Again) by copyblogger...

Content marketing is really what this is all about. Blogging (in the sense of the software and the best practices that help content spread and community grow) is simply the centerpiece of the effective and efficient practice of online content marketing.

So forget blogging as a movement, if you’d like. But keep the content marketing rolling.

Amen!