Is blogging on the wane?

Chip, the popular tech magazine ran a featured article on the present state of blogging in the face of the rising popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. We had our say on the issue, and gave them some stats to prove it. In the end, Chip concluded that blogging is definitely very much alive.

Anoop Johnson, Director-Marketing and Strategic partnerships at IndiBlogger, which is the largest community of Indian bloggers, feels that even though the number of bloggers has gone down, the quality has definitely improved. “Back in 2007-2008, we used to approve around 500 blogs every month, and reject around 700. Blogs are mainly rejected because they had duplicate content or did not have enough posts because the author ran out of things to say. In 2010, we approved roughly 600 blogs per month, while the number of spammy blogs came down to 500 per month. In other words, serious writers still continue to grow in number, while the half-baked attempts at blogging decrease since those authors have other outlets like Facebook and Twitter. Blogging requires much more discipline and passion than maintaining a social network profile, and there really is no comparison between the two.”

Read the whole article and the stats here.

Is blogging dead?


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10 Responses

  1. Vikram Karve says:

    Blogging is growing from strength to strength and improving day by day

  2. The Sorcerer says:

    Meh- its chip. Back in the days when I was a moderator in their forum and when I started doing hardware reviews on the forum, one of the admins pretty much made an impression that i was being paid/bribed with a hardware in exchange for positive reviews. Creating the blog Hardware BBQ not only saved my credibility but also expanded it. Can social networking do this????

    Back in November, I started Hardware BBQ- now I am so confident that I will be THE FIRST INDIAN SOURCE to make Hardware previews for PC Hardware. Now you ask anyone relevant in the industry “Who is The Sorcerer?” and there you have it.

    Social networking is a form of communication and interactionwith friends and families (although our meaning of “friends” differ). Comparing it with blogging is irrelevant and frankly speaking retarded.

  3. Sourav says:

    For some people like me, the passion towards blogging is way beyond Facebook or twitter. And after reading this article I think I realized that wasting your content/content on such website, we can actually write a lot more on our blogs, and be more regular!

    Thanks for this reminder, I think I’d blog all the more now! 🙂

  4. Karthik says:

    Its one thing to blame the time for not blogging regularly but who are we kidding? There is always time to pour some thoughts into ones blog. There are more people realizing it. I’m going to write an article around this too!

  5. There is a classic error in the argument. Won’t a blog die in anonymity in want of social promotion? Social Media should is a catalyst, and not a limiting factor for any thoughtful blogger. Social media doesn’t cannibalize your blogposts. However, a favourable presence and response (to your individuality) on SM platforms can ascertain favourable response to an otherwise non-promoted blog. Mentioning amateur and non-serious bloggers, there are non-serious people in every area, and it is they who make the remaining ones more important.


  6. Pallav says:

    Some big guys are blogging about social media and tweeting about blogging but that’s not the case for many of us. Blogging is a profound platform especially for writers. Blogs are there to stay and other platforms are just passe. I have seen my friends shifting from Facebook to blogger. I think the advent of social media is helping bloggers to transmit their ideas; it’s hardly depreciating the power of blogging.

  7. Iwrite4u says:

    Facebook or twitter does’nt provide me a space where I actively collect my poetry pages ( my personal poetry book )which anyone can read and comment.A road to my future publication in print 😀 .

    I agree with abishek that FB/twitter should and is a catalyst for blogging …driving traffic to our blogs,where in the blog holds our collections of thoughts and interest .

  8. Danish says:

    Can a paperback magazine launched more than a decade and which seems to have awful social media presence make an empirical statement on the evolution of Social Web ??? Were I to look for on information on this question I would turn to Web 2.0 popular sites such as Mashable, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb etc not because they are hugely popular but because they engage with the visitors a great deal- directly, such as in comments and indirectly, such as using Twitter,Buzz and FriendFeed. This ensures that speculations and predictions are based on realtime feedback rather than statistics.

    The second point I would raise is the comparison between blogs and social networks. IMHO, its like comparing apples and oranges. As the name itself implies, social networks are platforms to socialize, stay in touch with dear ones, rediscover old friends and find new ones and share information with them.

    Blogging on the other hand is primarily a platform to express your opinion, usually for the general public, although attempts are being made to implement community features in many popular free hosts, the fact remains that blogs in essence are fiercely independent.

    Finally, unlike in social networks, aggregating the number of bloggers is not easy, determining quality is impossible,so it is intriguing what metrics have been used.

  9. Only the committed survive. Great article and thanks Renie for sharing this 🙂

    Joy always,

  10. Rishi B says:

    well, I didn’t read the whole post but I’d just to like to make a point that there’s a new group of bloggers (or posters) who now post directly on social networking sites e.g. my own Movie Review fb page ‘5 seconds review’ and many such are now propping up. They’re kind on limited on the features they provide but if you do it just right, you can gain a lot more.

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