Premature Blogging Death Notice #357

Oh, Lordy. Here we go again. This time it's Jacob Donnelly of A Media Operator:

Blogging, unfortunately, died out as social media took off. Why write a short blog post when you can just tweet your thoughts?

This will be news to all the bloggers out there still successfully publishing things and getting read on the internet. This includes OG bloggers like Gruber or Kottke. among more recent players in fashion or the outdoors. Hell, even sites like Guido Fawkes are still essentially blogs.

So, yes, it might not have gone through a podcast-style revival and reinvention into big business. But there's still plenty of blogging out there, and there's time yet for a revival.

After all, newsletters are older than blogging, and their revival is only just building up its head of steam.

Blogging may be less prominent than it was in the mid-2000s but, as people discover both the ownership problems inherent in social media, and the discoverability issues around newsletters, it's just about due for a revival, too.

As the current wave of newsletter expand into websites for the SEO and discoverability benefits, the two mediums might end up pretty much one and the same. Ghost is a web platform that has evolved to support newsletters, Substack is going the other way.

There's life in the old bloggers yet…