Readers of Business Week magazine have been told this week that blogging is dead. And who told them that? An executive from Google - and not just any executive either. According to the product manager for Blogger, Eric Case, blogging is vanishing.

Now hang on a minute...what did he say...blogging is vanishing? Yes, the man who runs Blogger is saying that blogging is vanishing - at least as we know it. What he is really suggesting is that the vast majority of bloggers are moving on to become "twitterers". If you create an account with Twitter you can write tiny fragments of information, such as "just popping out to the shops" or "I've just fed the cat".

What appears to have happened is that people who just want to share anything have been using blogs to write a whole host of disparate items. One minute writing about work, another about their love life and the next moment about their favourite films. In other words, most bloggers have been writing without any focus. Luckily, along came Twitter allowing these unfocused messages to have a new home. That's good news for Blogger and Google and you can see why they are promoting the concept that generalised blogging is disappearing.

The average blog gets just seven readers - so if you have more than that you are doing very well indeed. But the reason the typical blogs gets so few readers is that most of them have material that is of no real interest to anyone. The evolution of blogging, removing these low-readership items is a significant step forward that should be welcomed.

What it means is that blogging will become focused on being a content management system for those people who really have something to say. If you have a blog you will no longer be perceived as someone who just lets their readers know they've "been to the post office", or whatever. That kind of drivel can now appear on twitter style services.

It also means blogs are likely to get more readers because people will now begin to see them as something useful. However, if you don't want readers, continue to write about the minutiae of your life and have a blog that is not focused on what your readers want. That's a sure fire way to not get readers.

Labels: blogging

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