The blogosphere and twittersphere has been murmuring today about an article on Wired written by Valleywag’s (Silicon Valley’s notorious gossip website) Paul Boutin.

In the article, Boutin claims that blogging is dead:

“Scroll down Technorati’s list of the top 100 blogs and you’ll find personal sites have been shoved aside by professional ones. Most are essentially online magazines: The Huffington Post. Engadget. TreeHugger. A stand-alone commentator can’t keep up with a team of pro writers cranking out up to 30 posts a day.”

I’ve written on this topic before [Boutin cites the Calacanis drama too]. And I think – again – Boutin is missing the point. Sure, media organisations, professional journalists and even ‘professional bloggers’ have jumped on blogging bandwagon and are now churning out posts all over the place, but that in itself does not diminish the power of blogs and ‘amateur’ bloggers. [The use of ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ is clunky because of  connotations associated, but I think you get the point]

Of course, when there were fewer blogs and fewer bloggers, it was easier for bloggers to be heard on a wider scale, but was this a good thing?

Now, I am a big fan of Twitter, but Twitter, Facebook et al work in different ways. Brevity is often good, but I rarely find myself musing on a 140 character Tweet in the same way I would on a thought-provoking blog post.

Blogging works best when the writer is focusing on a particular niche that they are passionate and knowledgeable about. And when you discover a network of bloggers discussing a niche that is of interest to you, then that can be very powerful and exciting. Professional bloggers are not as interested in ‘niche’ because the area of influence is not big enough.

We shouldn’t be naive enough to think that blogging (or at least ‘amateur’ blogging) will be around for ever or that is it even yet hitting mainstream, but I [still] don’t think it is dead or dying!

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