Blogging: Does It Have a Future?

One of the reasons I left this blog for six months (back in July '10) was that I was bored with it. I felt as if I had said everything I had to say. I was participating in revenue sharing sites, trying to get my novel published and I actually have a life outside of the cyber world. So, I let it go for six months until I found myself missing this old blog. I had considered deleting it (very happy I didn't do that!) completely. But, I decided to just shut it down to visitors. That was a mistake. My Alexa rating was in the 150K range and PR was and still is 3. Now, my Alexa rank is the three-million+ category. It probably would have been a better idea to just leave it up. But, I seem to be slowly building up my visitor base, albeit slowly. But, I also considered that blogging was on its way out the technological door. I'm still not convinced it isn't.
It seems with the advent of micro blogging platforms such as , and MySpace, to just name a few, blogging with good solid content was considered obsolete. Why post a five-hundred word count blog post when you can get your point across in just 140 characters on Twitter? That was my thinking when I left this blog. I'm still, somewhat, in that thinking process that blogging is needless in an ever changing world of technology. I've noticed that many bloggers have given up since my time away from David's Musings. But, according to this Pew Report, in this article, the thought is that blogging is not so much in decline as it is undergoing an "evolution" of sorts.
The Pew Report states that blogging did decline among teenagers, those in the 18-33 year old age groups there was a modest decline in the blogging world. However, the good news is that blogging actually increased among the older generation from 11% to 14% from late 2008 to 2010. As I stated earlier, there is acknowledgment in the report that blogging has reached its peak. This is the way things are in the USA. But, also, the report states that Wordpress is still growing with over 6 million new blogs in 2010! That is a remarkable number. While Twitter will continue to grow, missing tweets from friends is not unusual particularly if they have a large following. While Twitter is easy to get a point across, it is also void of any meaningful conversation with it's limit of 140 characters.
So, by most reports, blogging is not on its deathbed. It is undergoing a transformation to another era, a new generation of bloggers. Twitter, and the popular social networks have their niche in the internet world. But, blogging, at least for now, is here to stay.