Blogging has been around for quite sometime now. According to Mark Evans, there are about 175 million blogs on the internet.

Some days ago there was a post in Wired.com about whether you should bother to start a blog or not. The point made was that blogging wasn’t about passion anymore, it was more about commercial interests. What was once a golden age for bloggers with passion (in the times around 2004) has given way to social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. With a lot of high flying players in the field and more media options than a purely text-based system, the point that was being put forth was that blogs aren’t the buzzword anymore for the average enthusiastic writer.

I saw an opposing opinion by Chris Crum where he points that blogs are still the “in-thing” because people want them to be. People can always choose what they want to read and quit if they don’t want to.

While there were differing opinions on this, some users agree to this point. A run through Technorati’s top blogs list may show you a list of sites with professional bloggers hitting it at the rates of 20 - 40 posts per day. These are topic based ”authority sites”, from which the average blogger would need to “beg” for traffic if his link is included along with a bunch of other like-minded sites.

True, there is a lot of content out there today. And there are more professional blogs and social media links for most of the topics known than one would seem to care about.

But it’s not time to pull the plug yet!

Blogging always was, and always would stay, as a writer’s voice on the internet. When blogging started becoming popular, it was a sensation very like Internet “went public”. It’s an agreeable fact that blogging has become more commercial than whatever it was meant to be before. Social media sites does help to an extent to share opinions. But for the people who want to maintain a journal or write a diary of regular posts online, blogs are still the best thing available. For these people, a blog is still as good as an online journal, or may be a diary perhaps. And as long as there is someone who wants to write things and share it with people, they would be around.

I could think of a couple of points why blogs would stay around:

• A good reader can always choose and subscribe to a blog which they are happy about, and will surely give them good content - rather than get it chosen for them by a software. Common sense is still the best judge for humans rather than bots (and no, I’m not anti-computer or whatever ).
• A social media network gets filled up with a lot of things quite fast. You’ll get good visibility from social media sites for some of your posts, but the traffic will be short-lived. My understanding is that not many social media readers are regular subscribers to blogs (correct me if I’m wrong please), whereas your regular visitors would still be loyal to you on your blog if you are good with what you write in there.
• There are still people out there who consider their blogs to be their identity than being part of one in a million in a social media network. I’m one of them. As long as we keep blogging, blogs will be around.
• There are lot of splogs out there, but they get weeded out because they are either killed by Google itself, or the original blogger loses interest in writing them (or runs out of money paying for the autobots that post them). Unfortunately, splogs might also be there as long as blogs exist - it’s like a parasite, which cannot exist without the host. But good content will always keep getting churned out somewhere.
• Blogs have come a long way now, and are getting better everytime with new fiddles and enhancements. And, there is always room for new ideas and thoughts and for new bloggers to be born into the blogosphere.

For the average internet surfer, a blog is something like what the television is for a couch potato (no offense meant to internet surfers, it’s just an analogy). Before blogs cease to exist on the Internet, I think televisions might go!

There might come a time when blogs “die” or the “plug has to be pulled”, but that day is yet to come. Something better than what we have has to be invented, something which is much more regulated and much more visible to end-users. But till then, I’ll probably be running my blog!

(Yep, I have options provided for Social Media also. I’m not against them either ).

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