Among his predictions of 10 Things That WON'T Happen In 2009, Information Week's Digital Life blogger Fredric Paul says that blogging isn't ready to go the way of the dodo:
DON'T expect blogging to be replaced by Twitter and Facebook and Flickr. There was a lot of talk in late 2008 about how blogging had become bloated, passe, corporate, and overrun with flame wars and spam. (True enough, I guess, except for this blog.) And that Facebook and Twitter and the like are faster, more direct and more personal. Also true enough, at least in some cases. But reports of blogging's death have been greatly exaggerated. If anything, 2009 will see even more blogging than 2008, even as alternative platforms grow even faster. The death of blogging will have to wait.
I use Twitter, and I have Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube accounts, each of which is, to varying degrees, an important resource in both my professional and personal lives. But blogging is the cornerstone of my Social Media practice, so Mr. Paul will get no argument from me. Blogging isn't ready for a toe tag.
In fact, one could argue that blogging is the process one engages in when using any of those tools. Twitter is a mini blog. Flickr is photo blog, and YouTube a video blog. Facebook, in addition to being a kind of hybrid blog/IM platform, is also an aggregator for the content generated by or hosted on any of the other tools. So the blogging process is certainly evolving, but it's unlikely to fall victim to techno-Darwinism any time soon.
