Blogging: On it's deathbed?

As we know the medium today, the Economist argued in November, it quite likely is:

Blogging has entered the mainstream, which—as with every new medium in history—looks to its pioneers suspiciously like death. To the earliest practitioners, over a decade ago, blogging was the regular posting of text updates, and later photos and videos, about themselves and their thoughts to a few friends and family members. [Today] these tend increasingly to belong to conventional media organisations.

The rest of the article goes on to explain that newer, snappier platforms like twitter are filling the vacuum left by the increasingly big-show and commercial blogs. It concludes:

Gone, in other words, is any sense that blogging as a technology is revolutionary, subversive or otherwise exalted, and this upsets some of its pioneers. Confirmed, however, is the idea that blogging is useful and versatile.

Viewed as such, blogging may “die” in much the same way that personal-digital assistants (PDAs) have died. A decade ago, PDAs were the preserve of digerati who liked using electronic address books and calendars. Now they are gone, but they are also ubiquitous, as features of almost every mobile phone.

I don't believe I'm in much of a position to argue with the Economist staff on this one (I'm giving them the edge on journalistic issues). But I can't help but feel that their claim that blogging has lost it's potency as a subversive force doesn't quite ring true. For while it is very true that the highest-volume sites--HuffPost and Drudge are the first that come to mind--are professionally staffed, it can't be denied that small-team and individual blogs have to great effect, whether by catalyzing a story's breaking or by breaking a story itself, done a great deal to alter the landscape of a given issue. This may be truest of blogs covering a specific range of regional or community-wide beats, such as local politics. My home state of Minnesota's political blogging scene exemplified this trend last spring, when Republican and Democratic blogs broke respectively embarrassing stories about their challenging party's senatorial candidate. I won't labor for other examples--you likely have examples from your own community ring.

It also seems to me that more artistic and essayish blogs will retain their present eminence in the coming years, and for two reasons. The first is that artistic and scholarly blogs contain longer posts and are simply not able to be crammed into less than 140 characters. The Becker-Posner blog isn't switching from posts to tweets anytime soon. (Note: while it is true that a number of scholarly bloggers--Juan Cole among them--have twitter accounts, they most often use them to post article links or to draw attention to their main blogs) The other is that with more and more casual users--in other words, those who would post tweet-length posts on Blogger or Wordpress--switching over to twitter, Vox and comparable platforms, the scholarly bloggers will enjoy the medium increasingly to themselves (perhaps that is why, on the Gartner Hype Cycle of Social Software, blogging is moving up the "Slope of Enlightenment" portion of the curve). One final note on this. The only way the scholarly blogs would lose a share of their old market, it seems, would be for scholarly followers' previous interest in such blogs to wane. And I don't think anybody is expecting that to happen.

*A quick tab dump:

Andreas Kluth, a writer for the Economist, surveys some of his contacts in the new media (among them is the boss of Six Apart, the company that produces TypePad) to see what they think about blogging's future.

An example of what I think a "scholarly" or "artistic" or "intellectual" blog looks like, in case I failed to sufficiently elucidate above.