Blogging is evolving, not “vanishing”

As experts debate the role blogging and other forms of new media will play in the way future generations receive news, there is major change going on in the blogging world itself. An article in the this week’s Business Weekly describes the gradual disappearing of what some would see as traditional blogging.

“Blogs that tend to get a lot of press are the ones that draw a lot of traffic and get people fired up, but that is a very small, narrow, niche-use case,” says Eric Case, product manager for Google’s (GOOG) Blogger hosting service. Meanwhile, he says, the concept of blogging is already evolving. “This thing we understood as blogging is vanishing and it is reframing as people develop new ways of posting and sharing things.”

Blogging is certainly not dead or dying, it’s just changing. From a journalism standpoint, the type of blogs described as “vanishing” in the article — personal journals written for a very narrow audience — are the weakest. To 99.9% of readers who stumble across them, these blogs in no way constitute ‘news’ or anything worth reading for more than four seconds.

If an individual wants to let their friends know they went to Starbucks today, sites like Twitter will do a better job than a “lengthy blog reflection.” However, a blog is much better at expressing one’s analysis of current events than a Twitter status update.

As blogging continues its push towards becoming an increasingly viable and credible news medium, the more people who associate the term ‘blog’ with an interesting source for news instead of someone’s online journal, the better.

If this “Twitterization” can separate the bloggers expressing random thoughts from those making an honest attempt at citizen journalism, the more likely it is that mainstream media will take bloggers seriously.