Blogs are Dead!?!

A couple of weeks ago Wired magazine featured one of the “founding fathers of blogging”, Jason Calacanis who claimed blogs are dead and who said he had posted his last post. Reasons being, spam, as well as lack of interest among everyone except large corporate sites. Other good reasons related to SEO, which had been a key reason for the attractiveness of spammers, and had made blogs so easy to find in search engines. Apparently Google is dialing down the importance of blogs in their ranking formula.The spam issue had grown increasingly worse even on this blog, to the point where I had stopped allowing comments. And I was in fact considering ending the ‘experiment’.

After reading the article I asked bloggers on LinkedIn what they thought. Were blogs on their way out? If so, what about “blog mining” companies like Nielsen Buzz Metrics and TNS Cymfony?

I was glad Anderson Analytics has always focused our text mining on a wider variety of sources. We have been data source agnostic, if you will.
However, as you might expect several bloggers disagreed with Wired’s gloomy prediction. They also suggested various spam blocking software, some of which we’ve just upgraded this blog with. So you can once again post comments if you like (though they will be reviewed first).

In conclusion, this blog and others are not quite dead yet. Anderson Analytics will be releasing partial findings from our longitudinal work with GenX2Z college students next week. This data shows an increase of CGM especially blogging among college students. College women are driving this trend, as they are over three times more likely than college men to blog! Stay tuned for a more detailed look at this trend.

Until then, feel free to post a comment if you like