Blogs aren't dead - the way people share and communicate with readers of blogs is just expanding. You aren't going to write your blog post on Twitter or Facebook - you are going to share the link there to increase the numbers of people coming to your site. Medium is the only thing that is starting to shift this a bit - their entire concept is based around giving people a place to write blog posts without actually having a blog. There are some people and sites that are solely posting to Medium, but a majority are people who are posting to both their blog and Medium, often with links to said blog on the Medium page. Finding and discovering content is just easier now because it is based around what other's suggest is good. This is a result of having too much information and too much stuff to do. Now I need to have some sort of promise that the article or blog or whatever is going to be somewhat good or enlightening in order to read it. When I there are millions of articles and blogs and bits being posted each day, I want to see the best of it. I personally don't trust Twitter or Facebook for that - I trust Hubski or Reddit or HackerNews. Interestingly, I still use my RSS feed that I've been adding to for 6 years now. When Google Reader died I switched to Feedly, which I love. They have a section of the top 3 most shared/liked stories at the top of the feed. It's pretty cool and gives me the ability to easily access the best, directly from my RSS.
Most the blogs I follow have a twitter presence now. Instead doing the blog check and finding nothing new or nothing I'm interested in or not checking and missing content I see it come up on twitter and click through if it's something I might be interested in. So absolutely the blog isn't dead and many blogs are getting a little lift from the social media this guy suggests is pushing them to the periphery.
I do much the same with my twitter, and for those who don't use twitter I use Newsblur as a nice RSS reader.Instead doing the blog check and finding nothing new or nothing I'm interested in or not checking and missing content I see it come up on twitter and click through if it's something I might be interested in.
Such a load of twaddle, I'm afraid. Sorry, but the blog continues to perform amazing service as a specialist format, alongside other so-called dead formats such as forums. It's where people get the real information, as opposed to stupid pictures of kittens (which admitedly are very entertaining). This post by Kottke is the equivalent of saying radio is dead, long live radio. Twaddle. :)
I should have also linked to his own post about the piece where he expands a bit on his twaddle: Through various blogrolls (remember those?) and RSS readers, I used to keep up with hundreds of blogs every day and over a thousand every week. Now I read just two blogs daily: Daring Fireball and Waxy. I check my RSS reader only occasionally, and sometimes not for weeks. I rely mainly on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Hacker News, and Stellar for keeping up with news and information...that's where most of the people I know do their "blogging". I still read lots of blog posts, but only when they're interesting enough to pop up on the collective radar of those I follow...and increasingly those posts are on Medium, Facebook, or Tumblr.1 Like him, I follow far fewer blogs than I used to. However, I am probably aware of just as many, if not more. It's just that I usually land on them by way of aggregator. I do think medium lacks in that, unlike an individual blog, I am almost never aware of who wrote the piece.I am not generally a bomb-thrower, but I wrote this piece in a deliberately provocative way. Blogs obviously aren't dead and I acknowledged that much right from the title. I (obviously) think there's a lot of value in the blog format, even apart from its massive influence on online media in general, but as someone who's been doing it since 1998 and still does it every day, it's difficult to ignore the blog's diminished place in our informational diet.