I had a blast with this session from Northern Voice that I arm twisted Brian Lamb and Chris Lott to be part of, which I had pitched originally as

Every few months some pundit posts something online stating that blogging is dead (invariably posted in a blog). The only thing truly dead is a statement that “X is dead”.

Yes, blogging defined as publishing in blog software may be on a downslope, but blogging as the act of self publishing online has just diffused to more outlets from status messaging to YouTube dialogues. That said, there are deep problems with all the forms that are eclipsing blogs in the social media space. Blogging may yet emerge as the only hope in preserving what is best in human intellectual endeavor.

Come debate us, and bring out your dead (there will be coconuts ringing out).

I was pretty hooked onto a Monty Python / Holy Grail / “I’m Not Dead Yet” shtick,  with this hastily done over dub video

From the outset, I stated that the question of “Blogs Are Dead” is silly, and as Chris noted, he had led the same discussion in 2006. We had a very lively audience who wanted to interject, which was good, and what we wanted. The energy was good, but in the tight 45 minutes of the session, it felt like the heat had just turned up to a nice simmer before we had to let them go to lunch.

The session was recorded, so at some point you should find it on the conference web site. Until then you have my faulty memory. I had fun with this one using the free open source script, keynotetweet,  that allowed me to have twitter messages sent out on certain slides.

Update! Thanks to Grant Potter for sharing his ustreamed/recorded version

Rather than having us take false stands, our approach was for each of us to take 5-7 minutes to name some points on both sides of the questions- which were also set up in advance with two open wiki pages http://cogdoghouse.wikispaces.com/BlogsAreDead and http://cogdoghouse.wikispaces.com/BlogsAreAlive

I had a lot of fun just listening to my co-presenters different approaches to answering the silly question, and the data is in from our twtpoll:

What I got out of this is that what we are really interested in, and what feels alive, is the blog-like activity that at one time, took place only in these things called “blogs”– and that even trying to call this “blogging” was not a good fit because it doe snot fully describe the range of ways people are publishing and creating content online.

Bring out your dead!

The recent flip of the calendar (well not so recent, jeez, it’s been two weeks) reminds me that February is the time for my annual blog hiatus– I take some time off from posting here and devote my attention to commenting on other people’s blogs. This makes for the fifth annual CogDogBlogMuzzle, having done so in 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009.

Usually this coincides with attending the Northern Voice conference but since apparently there is some other small event happening in Vancouver, NV10 has been nudged to May 2010.

I do this because I still believe, after all these years, that blogging is not just about your own blabbing, but equally the critical act of participating in the spaces of other blogs. That is, if I can find any, as we all now allegedly blogs are dead. Again. That twitter, facebook, buzz et al have killed blogging.

Bullshit.

The only thing killing blogging, if indeed it is being killed, is people losing track of the value of having a publishing space of their own.

Again as before, I hope to find this invigorating and also to sample some blogs I’ve not read much. And also in tradition, I have run my yearly set of stats to find my top bloggers; this is a MySQL query I run in phpMyAdmin:

SELECT comment_author, count( * ) AS acnt
FROM `wp_comments`
WHERE comment_date >= ‘2009-01-01′
AND comment_date < ‘2010-01-01′
GROUP BY comment_author
ORDER BY acnt DESC

And here’s my applause for my leading commenters (well I wont applaud myself, that is not cool). I love you dearly.

• Alan Levine 149
• Jim Groom 37
• D’Arcy Norman 31
• Gardner 24
• Cole 18
• Stephen Downes 17
• Harriet 13
• Patrick Murray-John 13
• TOM 12
• Darren Kuropatwa 11
• Robin Heyden 11
• Russ Goerend 11
• Chris L 8
• Gerry 7
• Devon 6
• Susan WB 6
• Scott Leslie 6
• Beth Kanter 6
• alexanderhayes 6
• Kristina Hoeppner 6
• Liz Dorland 5
• Ed Webb 5
• David 5
• Rob Wall 5
• Mathieu Plourde 5
• michael chalk 5
• Allanah K 5
• Laura 5
• Suzanne Aurilio 5

But alas, the stats do show a drop in activity, both in my posting and comment activity, here in a chart generated in my Google doc of stats:

Maybe blogging is dying? My number of posts this year fell to almost what they were my first year. Am I my own hypocrite? Is it true the Nobody blogs like the Bava? NOBODY?

Yeah, I”ve been busy. Or maybe I shifted from blogging about neat web sites to… crap, I am an excuse machine.

I’ll come back to it- but in short the idea that blogging is only something that happens in a blog site is what I aim to challenge later this year.

So for the next week (at least, I might go longer), I’m prowling other blogs, anxious to see if they are shuttered ghost town as the pundits claim. I’m not relying on any comment tracking tool, since, well they never work. Instead, I will do some delicious tagging of where I leave my tracks– using tags of 2010 and commentblog to track my own activity — http://delicious.com/cogdog/2010+commentblog. This embedded feed will change as i do my stuff….

So if you want me to write all over your blog, leave me a link and comment below (spammers need not apply).

cc licensed flickr photo shared by mondopiccolo

I’ve got nothing more to say (here) til February 21.

I’ve been cruising through a techno funk, a semi-periodic time when I am just finding the motivation gas tank leaning towards “E” and have refrained from blogging about not blogging. And I am not doing that here. After the trip to Doha, I have a half baked, half written rant on being tired of conferences (that one will be left on the vine, it is old territory).

But sometimes, something new just comes along to revive the interest- I’m not sure if this is it, but this morning I caught WordPress Matt’s announcement of Post and Read via Twitter API — and hinting at how blogging is seeing a companion burst by riding the twitter wave (not the google one):

The other day I talked about micro-blogging and mega-blogging and shared my view that new forms of social media, including micro-blogging, are complementary to blogging. We’ve seen ongoing growth at WordPress.com as people started using Twitter, and we expect that to continue.

So what this new API allows is a way to subscribe to content — via a twitter client– from WordPress.com blogs — it’s been a long time since I;ve been in their dashboard; they have ways to subscribe to blogs directly or via tags to content from WordPress.com blog stuff. And.. you can use the same client to create a post from a twitter client. In Matt’s post, he tells you how to set up Tweetie 2 on an iPhone to do this.

Now this hardly seemed really earth shattering world changing etc, but sometimes, I am just curious to see how it works. So I set up an account in Tweetie for my WordPress.com account, and saw it pull in the posts from my old CogDogRoo blog there (not much else as I am not subscribed to anything).

That was easy. I had to go to my WordPress.com profile, and select which blog I wanted to post to via twitter:

And then I was able to post to a WP.com blog from Tweetie 2:

which ended up, as advertised, on my CogDogLab blog http://cogdoglab.wordpress.com/2009/12/14/okay-i-am-trying-the-new-twitter-api-th/

and because I forgot I did it, went back out to my regular twitter account because I had enabled that in WordPress.com

It seemed weird at first that there was no link to this post, but why? There is nothing else more on the blog then in the tweet.

So I don’t know here what practical application this has, but it now resides as a potential capability hanging out in the internet wind. One could set up easily with a P2 like theme, a microblogging looking site on WordPress.com, perhaps providing a place to hang updates in a place that looks like twitter but is actually not. I cant see blogging by twitter being something I would be doing… but this does seem like an interesting blurring between things we see as distinctly different (blog platforms and twitter).

There is something to what Matt write suggesting about the power of APIs being able to move data between services:

APIs are Biz Dev 2.0, as Caterina Fake put it, our ability to connect Tweetie 2 to WordPress.com proves this out. We didn’t have to talk to Loren Brichter because he built custom API support into Tweetie 2 — thanks Loren! (As an aside, I’d love to see custom API support added to TweetDeck and Seesmic, my two favorite desktop Twitter clients.)

This is a very subtle point- the developer of the Tweetie 2 app had not built this functionality into his software, but left a door for other people to be able to by adding the capability of extensible APIs. This is getting to be familiar but its also a radical way of building things from the way ti was done before the read/write web age.

No sign yet if this will be rolled into the self hosted wordpress code.

Just interesting.

“I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant, tweeting.”

(since I cannot use a copyrighted cartoon!)

Despite Cole’s assertion I have never made a rule about “blogging about not blogging.” This was actually something I heard at a presentation last February at Northern Voice as more of an observation of how often we start a post by “I am sorry I have not blogged I a long time…” or “It’s been so long since I blogged…” Whomever said that made the extension that much of twitter is about tweeting abut tweeting or not tweeting.

But is it really new?

I can recall writing a few hand written letters, “I am sorry I have not written since last summer…” or we call someone and say, “Wow, it has been 3 months since I called…”

Maybe I should be talking about not talking.

What was my point?

Despite my convictions that blogging is not dead , it sure seems like a lot of people represented my feeds in me reader… are not writing much.

Now before my friends and colleagues reach for the “I’m sorry blog post” my aim is not to shame people into a post. I do miss the rich interchanges that seemed to be common 3 years ago before nearly everyone dropped it mostly for sending status messages. What you do is up to you, and not blogging is a fine choice, as long as you are doing something good in the world. Or at least, you are Doing No Harm.

I have as much fun and gain as much from twitter than the next guy/gal, but when I look in the long run, all that stuff is smoke blown away. There are no tracks, no record, no accumulation of my experience. Twitter lets your old tweets fall of the table. I really resonate with the spirit Jon Udell describes as this process of “narrating the work we do” via blogs– and that is not harnessed by a stream of tweets.

Thus I have no need to apologize to some nebulous audience because I write directly for me– as this place becomes my growing (foil ball?) track record, one that I control, maintain, cultivate, curate. It goes way beyond the “portfolio” mindset of tossing artifacts into a dossier; the reflection, the emotional outbursts, the descriptions of what worked, what didn’t — is my body of work and of ideas.

Maybe its better that fewer people are blogging- less for me to read? Don’t blog, go off and tweet into the wind. Good luck making some sense of that scattered bit.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by hey mr glen

It leads back to my very first post 6+ years ago– I Blog Therefor I Am which was the first of may titles that play on a pun, but it still rings true– I Blog and Therefore I Continue to Be?

C-D-Blog?

D Blog S A B-S Blog.

O, S N-D!

And see, Cole- I trash my own “rules”- maybe worse than Blogging about Not Blogging is Blogging about Blogging.

When Barbara Ganley wants to collect her thoughts, she walks in the Vermont countryside, wanders home and blogs about it. In a recent post, she wrote about the icy impressions left in the snow by sleeping deer. In another, she said she wanted to commute by bicycle and do more composting.

If her blog, bgblogging.wordpress.com, sounds slow and meandering, it is. But that’s the point. Ms. Ganley, 51, is part of a small, quirky movement called slow blogging.

The New York Times, Yay for bgblogging.

Now Barbara Sawhill tweeted back shortly that several people were head scratching because this story was in the Fashion & Style section, not Technology.

But that makes so much sense to me. Look at her photo, contemplative with a laptop by a pond in the Vermont beauty we see through the photos of her blog post. That is it! She makes blogging in fashion and stylish! If the story was about some new computer chip or iPhone gizmo, then yes, Technology section. But this shows blogging as going beyond the technical bits- It is Fashion! It is Style!

I am serious about that.

If you want to see that, the post that she writs about it is NOT, “Hey Look! I am the New York Times” (apparently I am doing that post for her…) No, it is wrapped, enveloped, immersed into her struggles with the dire health of her faithful dog and the work she is doing with storytelling in small communities.

That is style.

Maybe that is why the light on my RSS reader is much more rarely on these days– everyone is S-L-O-W Blogging?

As much as she will demur to other slow bloggers, she so deserves to be in that lead story, as she is heroic in stature and humble in persona, an unbeatable, yet rare combination. If fast sloppy typo-ridden off the cuff rant blogging every gets fashionable, send the reporters my way…

Congratulations Barbara! You Rock!

One minor rant. When I got the article link Saturday, I could read it drectly. Now it is hidden behind a NYT login. Just curious as to what this accomplishes??

Blogs are dead.

94% of them have not published in the last 120 days.

I did not have time today to visit all 133 million blogs Technorati has been tracking since 2002.

cc licensed flickr photo by john_curley

But I have often marveled at the gems I find by random link walking from blogs- like a hike without a map — from one story that catches my eye, I am curious about a link that leads me down a lovely path, and before I know it, I am finding beautiful information like stumbling into a field of shimmering golden poppies or a maroon mountain vista (little “v” damnit!).

And for me that is a key- if you are one of the 16 or 17 little people who blog, there’s not much originality in following the stories of the Big Boys and Girls, unless you put a different spin on a story. The Good Stuff is finding stuff all those Snooty A-listers are not writing about. There are more trails than you can imagine, and more treasures to find, share, and spend some valuable time wandering among.

This morning I had an idea.

Or maybe too much coffee.

Starting from my RSS reader, I had landed on an interesting story on a blog with a curious name. I got even curiouser about some of the blogroll or linklog names in the sidebar, and wondered, “How far can I wander? What would I find? Is it all tombstones, black rot, and blog tumbleweeds like those big shot writers for Wired try to tell us?’

I found not death, but teeming life.

I found people posting at an astounding rate, and original (and wonderfully strange and often deeply personal and quite silly too) stuff. And I could find no sign that people were in the vain pursuit of a front page Google Rank.

Nor are they lone blogs crying to the moon; they are rich with comments and links.

So take a walk with me…

• The trailhead is my RSS reader. I get some great visualization and fascninating “data as art” stories from Information Aesthetics . it was here I went down the trail just a few short clicks and ended up at….
• Strange Maps a collection of… not always strange but interesting maps. Like From Pickin’ Cotton to Pickin’ Presidents where maps of seeminly un-related content and more than a hundred years of time difference… make sense. I peeked over the edge of the sidebar and headed for….
• where the past predictions of the future, often camp or cheesy, are detailed- Paleo-Future. Like back in 1957, Commuting will be a Breeze, the future looked like we’d be commuting to work in highspeed flying buses! From here I found myself on a precipice with no way out; the blog links from here were but feint trails and nowhere I could continue. This happens when wandering, so I backtracked to Strange Maps and found a different path, down the road to…
• Bldg Blog all about architectural, and lots of great photos, like the collage art highlighted in Resampled Space- striking images of “new, fictional, architectonic structures.” Wow the view from here is amazing, but I saw a track leading me to…
• pruned which is still along this trail of architectural related paths, but diverges more into landscaping- and i saw something very familiar from my home start in the magnificent aerial photo looking down at the Central Arizona Project. Improbably, water is sucked from the Colorado River on the California border, pumped up over a 1000+ foot mountain, and then canals its way hundreds of miles to feed the farms and suburbs of Phoenix and Tucson. Now that is quite a journey, but we are going elsewhere, from this blog I can see a shiny odd structure called….
• candyland. I am not even sure what it is, collections of writings, reflections, and art, but liked the iconography of the traffic light in tomorrow land. Let’s hope the green light stays on, cause we have been stuck at this damned red light getting nowhere for 8 years! Feeling a bit hungry, I saw just up ahead…
• the bright colors, lively music, and wonderful food smells of Mexico Cooks. It was quite a bit of everything, and lots of pretty things to look at like La Feria del Hongo (The Mushroom Fair) in Senguio, Michoacán (mmmm, should I eat those mushrooms??). Feeling more adventurous, I caught up with…
• Musings of a Barefoot Foodie who made me smile, and worry a bit about the meal she was preparing— Steak with Ice Cream Sauce . Where else on this wild trail would you come across such things? She suggested I head down the road and catch up with….
• the warm glow of June Cleaver Nirvana and what a fun, rollicking, place this is! I spent some time taking in the fabulous images of Texas Safari (yes, there are camels in Texas! Why not?). Seeking a quiet spot to reflect under a tree, I found myself immersed in…
• Quotidian Vicissitudes. And here I found a priceless gem, something really worth sharing (for unlike a nugget of gold, I can make more gems simply by giving them away), The Commenter Meme. Memes are common here in the blog wilderness, but this one is worth thinking about, and maybe adopting as a learning/social networking activity. It asks you to list links to the last 10 commenters on your site, and then asks some questions about each one that requires you spend some time exploring what may be new blogs for you to answer a series of questions such as “1. What is your favorite post from number 3’s blog?” or “5. If you could give one piece of advice to number 7 what would it be?”. I can see teachers maybe doing this with colleagues, or with their students, or maybe… well, I hope you find this as valuable as I did, but sometimes you rush into town with gold and some damn rock expert tells you it is pyrite (which is still nice and shiny, IMHO). Having tucked the gem into my backpack, I saw up on the hill…
• Vanity Press a place that looks tranquil and plain at first, but draws you into to local stories like Revenge of the Wild Life where you get to understand the challenges of dealing with a problematic Friendly Neighbor (FN). Over on the same reflective ridge, I walked to….
• All My Own where I started a bit into the waters of I Didn’t Come With An Owner’s Manual, smiled, and wondered what the implication of RTFM in relationships. And then…. I ventured down into a valley of more colors than I could think possible called…
• Tales of a Tree Hugger and as someone who enjoys looking closely at flowers with my camera, spent some time pleasantly lost in the video Meditation on a flower. And after some time here, I strapped on my pack and…

And on and on I could go. But I will pass this to another hiker, another wanderer. I thought I was venturing into the Valley of Blog Death, but could not really map the places I found on that false map.

In Looking for ones created with the comic tool gnomz (which are pretty sparse) I dug way back and found one D’Arcy did in 2005, and then said doh! I had done one myself – Aren’t They Just Diaries which pops up relevant again as people claim blog deaths.

This was a setup I did for a 2005 NMC Summer Conference presentation More Than Cat-Diaries: Publishing with Weblogs where, yes, in 2005 I was trying to make a case that blogware was a powerful publishing platform (and that site was the most extensive mangling I have every done with a blogger template, and that was not trivial!).

And um, ahem, this is my sideways stance again to say that if you keep blogging, and just just spray your updates to ephemeral fail whale prone social service sites; you are your own archive – http://cogdogblog.com/2005/06/01/comic-thang/

Here is the old gnomz comic:

Lacking no editorial oversight beyond themselves and opinions of their 2 readers, one thing a blogger can do is change their mind. And back again. Last week I asserted, that despite some valley wag’s wired opinion, blogging was not dead.

Actually I don’t change one bit of my barking at the Wired puff piece.

And more recently Nick Carr asked Who killed the blogosphere?

Blogging seems to have entered its midlife crisis, with much existential gnashing-of-teeth about the state and fate of a literary form that once seemed new and fresh and now seems familiar and tired. And there’s good reason for the teeth-gnashing. While there continue to be many blogs, including a lot of very good ones, it seems to me that one would be hard pressed to make the case that there’s still a “blogosphere.” That vast, free-wheeling, and surprisingly intimate forum where individual writers shared their observations, thoughts, and arguments outside the bounds of the traditional media is gone.

Carr pulls out the tombstone engraving in Technorati’s latest “State of the Blogosphere” report where they report that while tracking 133 million blogs since 2002, only 7.4 million have posted in the last 120 days (meanwhile there have been about 100 billion tweets and 3 trillion Facebook status updates in the same time period- okay, I MADE THAT UP THAT LAST BIT- if you quote that, do so at your own peril).

Like the Wired article, Carr tips the focus towards the head of the long tail, the individual blogger who can “significantly impact mainstream media” or as a rather active commenter puts it:

Q: When I say “blog”, I mean it in sense “X” (e.g. diaries, chatting)
A: OK, but THIS post is about “blog” in sense “Y” (e.g. individual voice with significant media impact)

And this still strikes me as an arbitrary, artificial distinction. It is still a small number of bloggers who reach, and maybe not much more percentage wise, who aspire to crack the Technorati 100. On behalf of the millions out there alive and blogging on the long tail, “WE DONT WRITE TO GET GOOGLE RANK”. We write because we have something to say, not that we want a massive audience. It disses all the ideas of Here Comes Everybody since all that count are Everybody in the Technorati Top 100.

flickr creative commons photo by Stuck in Customs

Ahem, the previous paragraphs started out as a two sentence introduction to what I was really going to write about, after all this time, we still waffle on exactly what is a blog. And I like that it is a messy definition, because there are interesting things that happen in the spaces of uncertainty.

I was reading a story on the New York Times site on Google Signs a Deal to e-Publish Out-of-Print Books (Hey do you remember when you could never link to a NYT article? or even see it without a login? Hurray for the passing of those closed garden days). In highlighting the text I was using for my delicious tag, I noticed the question mark hovering. And then I remembered the cool feature of the NYT site- any highlighted text can be looked up in a dictionary- so I took a stab at the word “blog”:

I do like that the results contain definitions from multiple sources, saying (I hope) that there are not absolute Commandment like definitions, but ones we have to sort through. Then it gets interesting…

The NYT Guide to Essential Knowledge (ahem, dated 2004) offers:

short for “Weblog,” a diarylike Web site, usually containing the personal thoughts of the site’s owner as well as links to other sites of interest.

The old blogs are online diaries approach. Yep, blogs are teen angst diaries and ramblings of thimble collectors. This is so narrow and old, I cannot my gag reflex.

The American Heritage Dictionary definition uses the old circular recursion method. A blog is either a noun:

A weblog.

or a verb:

To write entries in, add material to, or maintain a weblog.

Wow is that helpful. Under the listing or Blogger, one gets a little closer:

A website that displays in chronological order the postings by one or more individuals and usually has links to comments on specific postings.

But again, that feels rather limited as well.

But hurray for the Columbia Encyclopedia, which provides better breadth and context:

blog, short for web log, an online, regularly updated journal or newsletter that is readily accessible to the general public by virtue of being posted on a website. Blogs typically report and comment on topics of interest to the author, and are usually written and posted using software specifically designed to facilitate blogging; they include hyperlinks to other website and, often, photos, video clips, and the like. The most recent entry by the blogger is posted at the beginning of the blog, with earlier entries following in reverse chronological order; comments and other responses to the blog by readers are often posted after each entry.

Although some bloggers have (or have achieved) prominence and expertise that makes them as influential in politics and other areas as established journalists, reviewers, and critics (some of which maintain blogs themselves), many bloggers reach relatively few readers and discuss matters of largely personal interest. Blogs are also used by politicians, businesses, and others to keep voters, customers, and the like informed on matters of common interest; they can function as a significant alternative to television, newspapers, and other mainstream media, especially in nations where the media are controlled or censored by the government. Bloggers have at times broken important news stories or marshalled public opinion on a matter of public interest.

Online journals first appeared in the early 1990s. The development in the late 1990s of software that made updating an online journal easier and the subsequent rise of websites that specialized in hosting blogs spurred the rapid growth of blogging in the first years of the 21st cent., and by the mid-2000s there were millions of blogs on the Internet.

Now this was more an exercise in looking at the differences in definitions than hoping for a “correct” one. And I accept that the forms of expression or personal publishing that came primary from weblogs 4 years ago, now is dispersed into other places. Quick ideas, conversations play out haphazardly in twitter. I consider the way I use flickr as blogging, because it chronicles what I am doing in visual form, and I take the time to write captions for context. If I was into a lot of video, my expression might be played out in YouTube, blip.tv. vimeo, et al. Tagging sites in delicious or diigo becomes the sort of link logging that was prevalent in the early days.

But where do the reflective thoughts play out? Where do we hash ideas out on the open? And more importantly, with all this dispersed activity on sites that may or may not persist in the long run, where is hub that is us?

And that is why I blog, to have my own personalized space to do whatever I feel like. Come tomorrow, this site could be all about fish recipes or embroidery or history of tin soldiers. But I am my own archive, and to me that is important. And more so, writing, writing, writing, helps you think, process, develop. Twitter is fun but it is the candy of the web and I want the full course meal.

That said, it saddens my to look to my RSS reader and see so few updates from the sites I used to get my regular fixes. I can accept that people express them selves in other venues, but I miss the good, powerful, funny, poetic, silly, serious, quick, in depth, personal writing so f people I respect or respectfully disagree with.

And I guess its okay to repeat oneself in different words as last year I implored people to Viva La Blog.

Keep the flames of blogging (defined as posting to weblog??) alive. Well, at least I will be one flickering and flickring) candle in the wind.

In the November 2008 issue of Wired (which I am reading in old fashioned analog form, reading it on a plane flight), Paul Boutin suggests the blog is dead. 404. Deep Freeze. Passe. SO 2004. Not only Tired, but Long Expired.

Kill Your Blog. Still posting like 2004? Well knock it off. There are chirpier ways to get your word out.

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.

Writing a weblog today isn’t the brightest idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self experssionism and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns drown out the authentic voices. of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

Grrrrrrrr. Bleccch. What dog turds I smell there.

I have strong guttural reaction to this incredibly glib, shallow analysis of a complex environment, of something which even an author in a glossy magazine cannot claim to have seen enough of to make such a sweeping statement. But it speaks more to a reason why we should blog more, and spend more time to write meaningful content, that does more that sprays 140 characters, that persists more than a quick Scoble tweet crack high. This is a call to bloggers to announce, “I’m not dead yet! In fact, I feel pretty good! I might take a long reflective walk…”

Boutin goes on to describe how few individual bloggers are in the Technorati Top 100 or how most top Google searches are rarely now from individual blogs. The crucial mistake here is in the broad assumption that it is every blogger’s goal to be at the top of some list. It is surprising in a magazine edited by the author of the Long Tail, that a column would suggest the only focus of the blogosphere is to try to get to the small head.

When blogging was young, enthusiasm rode high, with posts quickly skyrocketing to the top of Google’s search results for any given topic… The odds of your clever entry appearing high on that list? Basically zero.

The odds of that being my goal? Extremely low. That is about the narrowest view of the web I have seen.

And it also suggests that the personal blog is the only form of expression; essentially missing the revolution that has happened in web design for small and media firms, where blog software is being used to power all kinds fo web sites, not just celebrity stalking or political ramps. I am still remembering a dazed feeling at the August 2008 WordCamp that there were about 400 people there who were all engaged in somehow using a blog platform to generate the online presence from everything to companies to needle work societies. I met numerous “web designers” who were really WordPress users. Or how an increasing number of educational organizations are exploiting the platform for an explosion of expression, creativity, sharing, discourse– that lasts.

But that strays the point. It’s only a small number of people needing some sort of ego fulfilment, the quick drug users high, of getting noticed. People blog because they have something to express, not because they expect millions of viewers (well 10 would be nice for many of us).

Another factor is that my blog is my blog. I maintain all the content; although it is hosted somewhere else, I have all my media, database backups, templates, I am my archive, It is my hub. It is me. These starry eyed twitter stars have no chance of permanence, tweets are not archived for their entire history, Facebook Haz Ur Stuff Not Urs– if your online existence is scattered in the social software space, you don’t necessarily have your stuff. it is subject to fickle economics, buyout, etc. But there is something that is stronger than, that; I am truly the Master of My Own Domain Name.

Now do not get me wrong; I am massively ‘out there” on my flickr activities and do enjoy and get a lot out of the twitterspace… but I cannot fathom how it can really be the future vehicle for creative expression, meaningful dialogue that will stand up for some length of time.

Brian recently wrote about the demise of old media, the layoffs of newspapers, the move from print to digital, He went on to lament the loss of thoughtful expression, research and writing as papers go digital. I first had a reaction to that as the medium itself should not dictate that any of that can change. It’s more about the institutions that might be able to carry such traditions, and I thiok Brian’s concern was that as these organizations need to find ways to thrive, compete in the new spaces, that the old traditions may go out the window.

To me, this is where large groups of individuals can make a difference. For every Jason Calacanis giving up his A-list blog for the quick-verse (as cited by Boutin), there has to be hundreds, thousands of small timer folks like you and me who don’t care how high our technorati rating is, who don’t write looking in the mirror to admire their reflection, but write to reflect on their being, their soul, things deeper and more important than stroking their ego, who care more about the concepts of slow blogging, of long deep thoughts by people like Barbara Ganley, Chris Lott, Clay Burell (whose A Portrait of the Teacher as a Young Racist is on eof the most moving multipage blog posts I have ever read). This IS happening, and just because Scoble doesn’t see it or it is not in some Gawker headline, does not mean it does not exist, does not impact. I am tired of this portrayal of the head of the long tail as being the only thing that matters. That issi bullshit.

We don’t have to give in completely to the new short form. We can carry on the traditions of the fading media business. And because we are not spitting them out in snack sized snippets, because we maintain our own content in its original form, blogging is more alive than ever.

Go out there, shut the lid, and write something out on paper. Compose a post, a story, a deep reflection. Save it as a draft. Re-read, and re-write, Dig deeper for your links than the first Google hit. Write for yourself, read others, comment others, write more. You will have your own record rather than a string of flip bird chirp comments. I relish my blog posts form 4 years ago; I really have no affection for a tweet I made last week.

Despite rumors to the contrary, in my blog, blogging ain’t dead yet. In fact, I feel pretty good….