Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Are Blogs Dead?

The print edition of the Nov. Wired ran an article called "Kill Your Blog." The online version had a different title, "Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004 ." Paul Boutin, a correspondent with ValleyWag, summarized his own article like this:

@WiredReader: Kill yr blog. 2004 over. Google won't find you. Too much cruft from HuffPo, NYT. Commenters are tards. C u on Facebook? That's all you need to read from my essay at the front of Wired's new November issue. The rest is good, thanks to stellar editing, but these days a 600-word essay — and a headline like "Kill Your Blog" — only stand out in print. See? They changed it online.
I think blogs will continue, but the article makes at least one interesting point:

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.

I don't think blogs are dead. But I do think it's much more difficult now for bloggers to break through the clutter. That doesn't mean you should stop blogging. It just means don't expect tons of advertising revenue and a book deal.

2 comments:

Alison said...

I agree with your analysis, Norman. Heather Green's comments on the "BlogSpotting" BusinessWeek blog also contain some sage advice for PR pros: http://tinyurl.com/5wg9zv

Norman Birnbach said...

Thanks for your comment, Alison. We tell a lot of corp. clients that they don't need a corp. blog. It's a lot of work for a senior executive to maintain, and we have serious concerns about ROI for most blogs. But I thought the best advice in Heather's article was this: Don’t blog about products, blog about customers’ problems.