Blogging is alive and well...just not living in California anymore

There has been much recently about the "death of blogging" which is curious, as the number of blogs is still rising globally. How come the disparity?

Was musing on this after reading Hugh Macleod's two sequential posts, the initial one was "Why we are all blogging less", followed up by "Blogging is part of something more important"

I don't agree that "we" are all blogging less, seems to me the main contingent giving up are either (i) people who have been blogging for a long while and are tired of it (which one would expect), or (ii) those who are finding that as blogging grows, their blogs do not quite stride the stage as before.

(Update - Hugh has replied that he didn't mean all bloggers, just many of the veterans he knew personally)

What makes more sense to me is the argument that blogging is just a part of something bigger, which is the emergence of an array of new publishing tools - starting with webpages - and as bandwidth goes up and costs go down, more will emerge.

There was also a good quote on Hugh's piece:

I remember Robert Hughes, the great art critic saying in his wonderful book, "The Shock Of The New" that the Conceptual Art scene that emerged in the 1960s-1970s was actually good for "Painting".

Why? Because with everybody else scattering bits of string around gallery floors and calling it “Art”, or covering themselves with butter, rolling themselves in the grass and calling it "Art", the only people left painting were those, as Hughes put it, "who still actually wanted to paint".

To take it to its logical conclusion, just replace "bits of string" with "Twitter" and the words "art" and "painting" with "blogging". Micro-blogging indeed.

(It does seem that the "bored of blogging" contingent do have quite a strong "in love with Twitter/Facebook/Insert Next New Thing Here" correlation - aka Cool Hunting as Malcolm Gladwell calls it - it's not just me who has noticed either ).

Postscript - a friend emailed re why Blogging was no longer in California - the implicit point was that blogging is now a global thing, so the centre of gravity has shifted. Our precise calculation shows its moving WNW and will pass through Montauk at noon GMT today