Blogging is dead?

Blogging is dead. That's what one of my online friends said in a newsletter of his recently. This was in conjunction to a rant of his about a blog he read. The deal is that the blog post, maintained by another local merchant, was nothing more than a wordy whinge about the local political economy (taxes and such).

Now first I want to spend some time defining my approach to this (this hearkens back to me ole DSUM days). By dead did he mean deceased? As in no longer extant, in this case, because of course blogging not technically having a life force was never alive in the literal sense. As in "Blogging is dead, long live the blog."

If that is what he means, I beg to differ. Blogging is on the up rise. More and more people have access to the tools, and time apparently, to jot down their thoughts and publish them for all the www to see. That being said, I don't think that's quite what he was driving at.

He may have meant "blogging is dead." I.E. "I'm gonna get you blogging." As amusing as that sounds, I find it difficult to believe that he is about to launch a one man campaign to end the evil that is blogging. Much as I would like to see the number of bloggers thinned or pruned, I really did not have something so permanent in mind.

Neither I think. I think what he meant was that, as the number of people blogging increases, the quality of blogs decreases, probably in some directly related proportion. So did news papers.

In the long term, the thing to watch for, I hope, is whether blogging goes the route of paper journalism or the route of TV. Paper journalism has over time evolved into several bands of quality, both measuring presentation and content. The consumer is forced to be shrewd with his choices on which kind of information to consume, but information dressed for all desires is generally available, and selectable. Television on the other hand, seems to continue to devolve, continually seeking a new, lower level.

This is what I think he was really driving at: as the quantity of blogging increases the quality of blogging decreases. The task becomes more and more like work to decide what to read and what not to read. After all, his parting comment on the subject is 100% true. There are no editors-in-chief for bloggers.

I should get me one of those...