I’ve asked the question of where blogging fits into the evolving social landscape before:

Is blogging still an effective communication medium?

I’m not so sure. It’s rapidly becoming over monetized, repetitive and as less relative.

Micro-blogs, tumblelogs, social networks and Twitter are quickly eroding the “instant information” strangle hold that blogs once held.

I’m still not sure blogging as we know it will move ahead into the new landscape. For one, it’s not easy to do anymore compared to platforms like like Twitter, Tumblr, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Last.fm, del.icio.us, yada yada yada.

Wayne Porter blogged his response to my question with this:

Sam Harrelson, and I think with a rhetorical bent, asks if blogging works anymore and offers this up:

“Blogging will act as sort of the standard print edition of collected thoughts rather than the only medium that the thoughts are expressed within.”

Exactly. If you think of the Bible as being a collection of “books” or “writings”, or at the very least a collection that has been “canonized”. One can see how the standard blog can become a sort of “canon” for all the information, thoughts, new forms of media, pictures, sounds, IMs, video, etc that are whizzing by us everyday. The velocity will only increase and standard blogging cannot pace this velocity.

I’m not so sure you can equate standard print editions of old books (and I do love my books) with blogs. Blogs are intermediary vehicles between the old world “book” and the new world presence platform. Blogging is almost like a temporary driver’s license for our digital culture. We had to make sure that we could handle the steering and control the vehicle of communication on the web before moving on to the next step.

I’m rambling here because I really don’t know. I’m getting more and more of the type of info from places like Twitter or Facebook that I used to get from blogs and reading feeds. None of my college students blog, but they all have Facebook profiles and regularly update there via mobile, the web, etc.

Sure, blogging will have a place… but what will that place look like? Stodgy and dusty archives collecting dust on the never read bookshelves of the digital library? I don’t know.

Ars Technica has a write up on a study by Gartner that says blogging is soon to reach the peak of its growth curve:

The blogging “trend” could reach its peak in 2007, according to a recent Gartner report. The prediction came as part of a larger report of the group’s top 10 predictions for 2007 and beyond and speculated that the number of active bloggers would hit its all-time high in 2007, leveling out soon thereafter.

That’s something to weigh and consider as we move ahead into the digital unknown.