Are Blogs Disappearing? We Think Not.

This is the weekend edition of TheMarioBlog and will be updated as needed. The next blog post is Monday, February 9

Blogging for blog

Did I hear right?

I can’t believe that the words blogging and nostalgia are now spoken in the same breath.

Indeed, there are many who assert that the era of the blog is all but almost washed up, that social media has rendered blogs —as we knew them— not so desirable to establish an intimate conversation between blogger and audience.

A recent piece by Ezra Klein for Vox sums it up:

“…at this moment in the media, scale means social traffic. Links from other bloggers — the original currency of the blogosphere, and the one that drove its collaborative, conversational nature — just don't deliver the numbers that Facebook does. But blogging is a conversation, and conversations don't go viral. People share things their friends will understand, not things that you need to have read six other posts to understand.”

Klein’s commentary comes on the heels of Andrew Sullivan’s sudden announcement that he is quitting writing his highly popular political blog.

Not all agree that blogs are disappearing. In fact, in a blog responding to the Klein piece, Paul Krugman, of The New York Times, has plenty to say to remind us that blogs are still a viable way to communicate with an audience. Take a peek:

“What was interesting in Ezra’s piece was the suggestion that a golden age of blogging, in which blogs were a personal conversation between the blogger and the audience, has passed. That seems to me to be an incomplete story, both about the past and about the present.”

It does not seem like Krugman is about to throw in the towel and stop writing his blog. For the record, neither do I.

“Ezra suggests that social media have undermined the original version of blogging, in which a blog was a personal conversation between the blogger and his or her audience; now pieces have to be stand-alones that work for all the people who see them via a retweet or whatever. I can see what he’s trying to say. But as someone who got seriously into blogging just as, according to Klein, the golden era was coming to an end — and as a writer who, much to his own surprise, has developed a fairly imposing social media presencefor someone who isn’t Katy Perry — it seems to me that there’s less conflict involved than Ezra suggests.
Yes, there is a tension between maintaining a conversational feel and producing pieces that can be read on their own. But it’s a tension, not a contradiction: you can, with effort, maintain a blogging style that makes regular readers feel that they’re part of an ongoing conversation yet makes individual posts meaningful to people who aren’t reading everything you write. A blog can be a floor wax and a dessert topping, if you work at it.”

We like our early conversation with you

I agree with Krugman and TheMarioBlog will continue as long as I have the iinspiration to get up each morning and think of something that I'd like to share.

If the blog has gone the way of the floppy disk, I guess nobody told me. I continue to make an appearance here in TheMarioBlog each weekday, and it offers me a window to what’s trending out there, and, of course, a bridge to all of you who honor me with your visits. While I don’t see you, I feel that we have a sort of ritual here.

Dave Winer, a blogging pioneer, once defined a blog as "the unedited voice of a person.”

Indeed, unedited is the right term here. Because of that, there is always the fear of sounding dumb when you write a daily blog. But there lies the essence of what is great about blogs in that they are an informal chat between blogger and reader. Nobody expects brilliance, necessarily. It’s more like a conversation across the fence between good neighbors who like cultivating the same vegetables in their garden. Or, at least that is how I see it.

Long live the blog.