Blog to the wind/ To the wind only/ For only the wind will listen
(to paraphrase T.S. Eliot who pulled “Prophecy to the Wind” from the Bible)

Recently, I’ve seen rumblings that blogging is dead. And I want to say something about this notion, regardless of the persuasiveness of those trying to postulate the theory.

Are 156,000,000 Bloggers Wrong?
First, there are an astronomical number of blogs on this planet. I looked it up again on Wikipedia, “As of 16 February 2011 (2011 -02-16), there were over 156 million public blogs in existence.” If there are 350,000,000 websites on the planet (a number I found some time ago) that means nearly half of them are blogs! So, if blogging is dead then half the web addresses on Earth are obsolete. Ok, this is just me playing with numbers but I think I just made some kind of point.

Blogging Augmentation Abound
Second, speaking as someone who is exposed to new blogs every day, I can see new people with new ideas using the blog format to express themselves and promote their ideas, products and services. Then there’s this, I can see that the traditional notion of a blog as a web diary or web log, is changing. Sure, there are new formats that theoretically are taking share away from blogs, for example, Flickr, Picassa, Pinterest photo galleries. Many people use those formats for telling their stories and there are other new formats too.

Brains Being Rewired
I’ve been thinking about Mr. Crap’s “keep it brief” mantra. I’ve been thinking about how people are changing they way they express themselves multitasking like crazy and pouring thoughts into Facebook, Twitter, Plurk, video games and all forms of texting. Then there’s this, I saw a cable program that talked about studies indicating that brains of kids brought up in our era are in essence being “rewired” for this new type of information processing (here’s an article “Are Our Brains Being Rewired by Technology?”).

NTL, Blogging Lives
Recently on one of my Facebook sweeps, I came across a post I like: “If you have an idea, post it. If you need to expand on it, blog it“. Anyway, I thought that was a dandy point of view when looking at the evolving communications mix. I think there was more to the remark, but that’s what I focused on and now I can’t find that post again (although I think it was on ResumeBear’s blog). I don’t see blogging being dead until our brains are so completely freakin’ rewired we can’t concentrate on anything larger than 140 characters at a time.

Ezekiel 37:9 – “Prophecy To The Wind”
I believe something very important is being lost with the change in our pattern of concentration. I can see the impact in myown profession where thoughtful software engineering is increasingly being replaced by eXtreme programming teams and the like. I can see it as fewer people can write complete sentences, even simple ones. I can see it in communications of every form. Like everyone else, I’ll adapt to this change. And in the future I’ll refrain from writing posts like this with its excessive 527 words with no pictures, videos or sound files. /me giggles.