Blogging vs Status-updating

Businesses, content publishers media channels have been pushing for blog creation as a way of engaging existing and reaching new readers. With 133 million blog posts submitted on Technorati since 2002, blogging is deep-rooted in all mainstream online media.

So why do I believe that blogs are losing popularity to Status-updating?

With the popularity and inescapabilty of microblogging and activity streams and time lines, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and the like are competing to build a community around the status-updating system – the state of publishing, reading, responding to, and sharing micro-sized updates.

This new trend of pacey interaction is further scattering the conversation and is growing online interaction beyond the host site through syndication to other relevant networks and communities. Those who might typically respond with a formal blog post (on the host site) may now choose to respond with a tweet or a status update.

Blog posts are increasingly being shared in micro communities and social networks which is detouring attention and time away from posts on the host website or blog. Social network users comment back on shared blog post, creating conversations away from the original blog post. We are learning to publish and react to content in “Twitter time” while spending less time blogging, commenting directly on blogs, or writing blogs in response to blog sources because of our active participation in micro communities.

Likes and RTs (retweets) on Facebook and Twitter and posting shortened links that connect friends and followers back to the source post, have changed our behavior regarding blogs and made us major players in defining the evolution of the connectivity and dissemination of online content.

Technorati might not have foreseen it, but Twitter and Facebook might as well be its next biggest competitors.