Blog Epitaphs? Get Me Rewrite!

Pretty clear headed look at blogs from, of all places, The Wall Street Journal. I wish I’d taken the time to read it in more details and add something but I gotta clear some stuff before leaving for Austin so a couple of quotes will have to do.

Reports of blogging’s demise are bosh, but if we’re lucky, something else really is going away: the by-turns overheated and uninformed obsession with blogging. Which would be just fine, because it would let blogging become what it was always destined to be: just another digital technology and method of communication, one with plenty to offer but no particular claim to revolution.

My bet: Within a couple of years blogging will be a term thrown around loosely—and sometimes inaccurately—to describe a style and rhythm of writing, as well as the tools to publish that writing. This is already happening: One of the chief problems with some chronicles of blogging’s demise is their confusion about definitions, a confusion that’s mirrored in efforts to measure blogs’ popularity or to say anything that can apply to bloggers as a group.