Blogging: not dead yet?

OK, this is starting to get confusing.

First, Steve Rubel tells us that blogging is passe, and that lifestreaming is in. This was just last month,* and in my post about Rubel’s big pronouncement, I expressed some reservations about abandoning blogging altogether. Besides, Rubel’s lifestream looked a lot like a blog to me.

Now, less than a month later, I read, via Shel Israel’s Global Neighbourhoods blog (tagline: Following Social Media Wherever It Leads), that blogging may not be so dead after all.

Israel, who co-authored one of the essential books about the power of blogging, Naked Conversations, with Robert Scoble, informs his readers that Scoble has “declared that he is going to start blogging more these days, after having spent most of his posting time at Friendfeed and Twitter.”

Hmmm. Seems like the web two-dot-oh A-listerati thought leaders ought to agree on a consistent message and then stick to it.

While Rubel and his ilk parade the social media byways, beckoning us to Bring out your dead! — Scoble, Israel and the like are assuring us that blogging is indeed Not dead yet!

It’s interesting to read Israel’s post, which seems suggest some disenchantment with short-form micro-blogging. It’s also interesting to think of blogging as “magazine-style,” long-form writing, which is how Israel describes it.

Overall, I agree that, while blogging may not enjoy a resurgence, some of us will continue to share our thoughts in this form as well as in the shorter blips of Twitter, Facebook, etc. I think Israel’s tagline summarizes the feelings of many of us; we’ll follow social networking wherever it leads. And if we should follow a dead end or grow weary of the new way, we can always go back to return to an older, more familiar path.

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* Rubel isn’t the first to proclaim that blogging is dead. Wired published an essay last fall that called blogging “so 2004,” which led me to post about that essay (and Britney Spears) last October.