Is blogging dead? Last year, questioning the future of the iconic weblog would have had me institutionalized. But today, in the face of the dramatic explosion of real-time social media services like Twitter, the future of blogging is far from certain.
It’s not just me questioning the blog. Last week, I was in Amsterdam, with a thousand of my closest new media friends, at The Next Web, one of Europe’s biggest and best tech conferences. And the words whispered in the Next Web hallways about the future of blogging weren’t always promising for the venerable digital institution. Some pundits at Next Web – such as Hermione Way, the London based founder of Newspepper and the presenter of Techfluff – have even begun to pen their obits to the blog. “Blogging as we know it is dead,” Way told me over dinner one evening at Amsterdam’s Loup restaurant. “It’s finished.”
Are these reports about the death of blogging exaggerated? At that same Loup dinner that Way announced the death of blogging, Matt Mullenweg, the San Francisco based co-founder of the open-source blog company