Blogging Isn’t Dead

You may have heard that blogging is dead and thus are wary of investing your time and effort in an activity that’s obsolete. Don’t be! To adapt a famous quote by Mark Twain, rumors of blogging’s death have been greatly exaggerated. The blogging ecosystem is now extremely mature and well established. Individuals and companies continue to reap incredible benefits from blogging, and if anything they have fewer competitors willing to invest the time and energy required to produce longer content. So they’re more likely to stand out.

Among many reasons why publishing quick content on social media (say, on Twitter) is so popular is the fact that it takes minimal effort to do so. You can share a link or a short thought with your followers in a matter of seconds. Conversely, a well-written article for a traditional blog could take a couple of hours to craft. Some see platforms like Twitter as an evolutionary branch of blogging, targeted toward an Internet audience that’s stereotypically perceived as having a short attention span.

As a technical blogger, you have nothing to fear from these microblogging platforms. They don’t compete with your blog. They are a complementary tool to reach your audience. A maximum of 280 characters is sufficient to enable you to share what you’re watching on TV, crack a joke, link to an article, or share a quick thought, but it is ill-suited for essays or HOWTOs on technology (long Twitter threads notwithstanding). Instead, think of social media as a complementary way of blogging and broadcasting your message. Later in the book, we’ll outline a complete strategy to take advantage of such platforms in that capacity.

By the way, exact blogging statistics are hard to come by; but using available numbers from some of the larger players like Tumblr and WordPress, it’s quite likely that there are well over 500 million blogs in the world. This number has roughly tripled since the first edition of this book, published five years prior to this second edition. Blogging is indeed alive and well.