The Death of Blogging: Part 271

It seems that every month there is a newspaper article about the death of blogging. Editors talk.

Verne Kopytoff wrote a sensationalist headline in the New York Times in February 2011 entitled, “Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter.” I and others responded at the time why Verne was nuts and blogging was very alive.

Another year and another headline, this time in my local newspaper, The Daily News of Newburyport, in the form of an editorial entitled, “Blogging Dies Its Slow Death.”

As if.

The editorial cites (but does not link to) this University of Massachusetts Dartmouth report, yet the latest in a series of annual reports that compare blogging trends in the Inc. 500 over time, that elaborates corporate blogs are disappearing and corporate Twitter accounts are gaining notoriety.

It’s Kopytoff all over again.

The fallacy of such reports by UMass Dartmouth is while the trend may be true for corporate blogs, it’s definitely not true for consumer blogs. Take a look at NM Incite’s report of 181 million blogs and you’ll quickly observe the trend of dying blogs is hardly true.

I grant the Daily News editor that the news is not all grim. He does write, “There’s no doubt that the blogosphere remains strong, at least for now. There’s an estimated 170 million blogs out there, many of them maintained by private individuals. But their growth has slowed over the past two years, and data indicates the growth has reached its peak.”

NM Incite doesn’t indicate any peak and the number of blogs continually added to Alltop is not waning either. So, what’s going on here? Why must headlines continue to be printed about the death of blogging?

When will part 272 be published?