Blogs are Dead! Long Live the Blog!

Did you hear? Blogs are dead. They've over. Everyone's Twittering and Powncing and Facebooking, and blogs are history.

Well, unless you live in reality, that is. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you haven't been following the discussion among the Web 2.0/social media gurus, who lately have been mostly showing us that they are disconnected from the realities of actual people running actual businesses that sell products and services that people pay actual money for.

Basically, a bunch of potentially interesting tools have come along, and the perpetually-distracted gurus have moved onto the next thing. Twitter is now a format for "microblogging," which seems to be a polite way of saying "reducing your blogging to 140-character burps, thus eliminating that pesky insight, personal voice, or need to think very hard."

OK, OK, I'm being hard on Twitter, which I actually use, and find entertaining and - every now and then - useful. However, what I've noticed about bloggers who've started Twittering more than blogging is that they have, in general, become far less insightful or interesting. (In general. There are always exceptions.) Lack of focus and unwillingness to share critical thinking - which generally cannot be done in 140 characters - do that.

And for marketers, of course, there's the little issue that most of the people you want to talk to probably not only don't use Twitter, they probably have never heard of it. Does that mean you should ignore Twitter? Of course not. It means that you should keep a little perspective.

Anyway, BL Ochman over at MarketingProfs has a nice, succinct (but too big for Twitter!) summary of why the discussion of the death of blogging is, to put it as kindly as I can, dumb as rocks. I've seen the same things she has in my work: the bleeding edge, reading TechCrunch on their iPhones while twittering about their breakfast crowd may be tired of blogging, but the business world is just getting going. (And guess who pays a consultant's bills?)

Check it out, and if you get drawn into one of those tedious discussions about the relative benefits of Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce, keep it in mind.