Are blogs still relevant?

Just saw this tweet from @kevinrose on Twitter:

hmm, Pownce (notes/files/links), Digg (stories), Twitter (short updates), FriendFeed (aggregated comments), do I still need a blog?

Just minutes before I saw this tweet I was having a discussion with a colleague that is thinking about shutting down his blog altogether in an attempt to regain focus on the things he considers important.

In my previous post, when I said I was evaluating how to keep this blog up as a reflection of what I’m about, I have to be honest that shutting this blog down was also one of my options. It’s been 5 years since I started it, and it’s been a good run, but it doesn’t completely feel like a good fit for me anymore.

It seems there’s a better way to share information. I hardly read RSS feeds anymore. I get all my links and information from tweets. All the blogs I truly care about tweet links to their posts, so RSS reading has almost fallen by the wayside for me as well.

So, you tell me. Am I jumping the gun here, or have blogs as we know them begun to lose their relevancy?

About this entry

You’re currently reading “Are blogs still relevant?,” an entry on the martini shaker*

Published:: 07.09.08 / 12pm

Category:: Discussions, Interweb, Social Media, Technology

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seth 3 months ago 1 point
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I think that blogs are still useful. Sometimes I have a LOT more to say than I should, and I haven't fully disposed of my blogging engine. Eventually, I may utilize Tumblr (or something similar) to run my stuff -- but I don't think we've successfully found our one size fits all yet.

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3rdmartini 2 months ago 1 point
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I'm thinking FriendFeed over Tumblr, but that's just me. Trying to figure that one out myself.

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Average Jane 3 months ago 1 point
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I like having a blog as my home base for all my other social media activities. I may cut back on posting (and, in fact, I already have), but I don't see myself discontinuing it. I like having a long-form medium for photos and/or stories.

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http://averagejane.blogs.com

John Dowdell 3 months ago 1 point
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While reading your post, I realized that one of the big reasons I started blogging was to be able to efficiently respond to a hot issue popping up on a dozen mailing lists or newsgroups.

But now the same dynamic is working against blogging. That "Flash Lite ported to iPhone!" story this week is a good example. There are too many bloggers out there who don't read the issues they're earning ad-revenue from, and who screen out comments which don't match their desired narrative. I'm chasing new iterations of old issues across weblogs, just like I used to chase across mailing lists. PITA.

Twitter is useful for microblogging... a good 140 characters is more readable than some multi-screenful of text in a blog essay. Lots of tweets I see in summize.com are still incomprehensible, though, particularly when set up in a conversational chain. Blog essays are still useful, but they're not the daily habit they were a few years ago.

Maybe keep your weblog, but just change its focus? You've already got your Twitter stream in there, which helps for immediacy. One medium doesn't replace the other, true...?

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http://blogs.adobe.com/jd

3rdmartini 2 months ago 1 point
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I agree, one doesn't necessarily replace the other - at least for the foreseeable future. See my clarification below.

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Douglas Karr 3 months ago 1 point
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You're utilizing a generalization when you should be asking, "Is my blog still relevant?". Forrester recently released info that the majority of B2B blogs fail (for a number of reasons, but relevance is important).

It's easy to tell if your blog is more or less relevant - just keep an eye on your analytics, number of leads, number of conversions, etc. that your blog brings you.

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3rdmartini 2 months ago 1 point
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True, but I'm really talking about blogs in general, not just B2B.

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3rdmartini 2 months ago 1 point
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I'm thinking that the better question for me to have asked is "are blogs still relevant as the main source for people's information?"

For me and many others around me, it's becoming more obvious that blogs are slowly taking the back burner in lieu of shorter, more succinct bites of information. If I see something that I feel deserves a deeper dig, I can do so. Otherwise, I just got the summary for what I need to know and can move on about my business. Yes, RSS feeds serve that purpose, but a Twitter or FriendFeed stream is much more asynchronous and allows us to more passively digest those summaries while going about our day-to-day activities.

Of course, I have to also remember that I, along with many of us in the industry, are early adopters and that the mainstream still has a way to go before they have the potential to shift to this mindset.

My question of irrelevancy may not be worth much in the short term, but just like all web trends, it's one that's worth keeping in the back of our collective minds moving forward. Why? Because it signals an even greater degree of fragmentation, and we marketers all know that's bad... m'kay?

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3rdmartini 2 months ago 1 point
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Here's another very interesting way to look at this:

http://www.winextra.com/2008/07/09/2-solid-reas...

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church fundraising 2 months ago 1 point
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Yes, they're still still relevant thats why most blogs shows up in google search. Its more updated.

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http://ideas4fundraising.blogspot.com/