Reports on the death of blogging are greatly exaggerated. While I am distracted, fascinated, and constantly learning from my daily involvement with Twitter and Facebook, among other business/social networks, I am not about to give up daily blogging. And at the C-level, a lot of companies are finally accepting blogging. Blogging has legs, and here's where I think it's headed...


o Twitter is ephemeral.

Its immediacy and community are addicting, but Twitter has no permanance.
You can't search it; you can't categorize the posts. You can't illustrate a point with a photo or artwork. You can't post a video. It's as fleeting as any conversation.

o Limiting your network leaves you preaching to the choir.

It's extremely interesting and valuable to share information with your peers. But if you want to expand your business, you need a global reach.

Where blogging is headed:
Blogging is evolving and maturing. Bloggers who have a real passion for writing and who have developed an audience will keep the conversation going in this platform. But the format of blogs is changing, as well as the content of the ones that are starting now.
For me, and I think for a lot of other serious business bloggers, a blog is a storefront and, once it gains a big enough audience, a global micro-brand. You don't just walk away from a successful blog that took blood, sweat and tears to build because a shiny new object came along.
o C-level executives are just getting comfortable with blogging - and are becoming more open about discussing issues that previously would have been vetted or banned by legal.

Take a look, for example at the new JNJ BTW, which promises a three-dimensional view of Johnson & Johnson. There's a discussion of J&J's lawsuit against the Red Cross - something you would never have seen even two years ago. "Everyone else is talking about our company, so why can't we?" says the "About."

o Businesses have finally become much more open to launching blogs built on substantive and strategic premises.

And hopefully most have learned that unless they are genuine and transparent in their approach, they will not have an audience.

o Blogs will become more communal.
You'll see more multiple-author blogs like the Clutter Control Freak that I just launched for Stacks and Stacks. It is difficult, as any long-term, serious blogger can tell you, to keep a blog lively, interesting, and frequently updated with just one writer.
I see blogs becoming more like magazines than journals, and less likely to pretend to be objective. Because objectivity is not the point of blogging. This new medium is about opinions, and transparency. And it's here to stay as long as people who feel passionately about broadcasting their opinions can maintain and grow an audience.
And, since we're social creatures who like to talk to people who share our interests, as we can on Twitter and Facebook, micro-media and socnets are here to stay too.
See, we can all just get along. We just need to keep adding new features to keep things interesting.