The Irrelevance of the “Is blogging dead?” Debate

From the as yet unreleased blog of the soon to be re-launched MBA website...


An article in the Independent on Monday 20th April stirred up the ever-present argument about whether blogging (or insert any other new technology) has had its day.

Andrew Keen presented two quotes which initially appear opposing. Firstly, from Hermione Way of Newspepper.com and Techfluff.tv, we get “Blogging as we know it is dead”, “It’s finished”.

Secondly from Matt Mullenweg of WordPress “Blogs will become aggregation points… they will become personal hubs. Places where we store all our own media content, such as our Flickr photos and Twitter posts.”

But as Andrew Keen correctly surmises when evaluating who is right “They both are, of course”. The technology will move on; people will start to use the technology in different and more interesting ways. The original static blogs will evolve into more advanced formats, just as the humble website has developed since its first incarnations. For example, the Wordpress technologies mentioned in the Independent article are just two of the myriad developments:

Buddy Press is a suite of add ons that turn a multi user Wordpress blog into a social network.

P2 adds Twitter like functionality.

In reality this debate is utterly redundant. As Clay Shirky observed 5 years ago, yes, 5 years ago…

“So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this - the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.”

Whilst there is cheap and fast access to the internet, whilst there are cheap and simple technologies to publish information, people will be uploading all sorts of content. Some will use it for specific purposes (income related or otherwise), others will just mess about with friends and others will do everything in between.

Websites and technologies will come and go, but people will be sharing content via digital channels forevermore.