How Social Aggregation is Changing "Blogging"
This morning Eric and I presented a webinar on social media entitled “Social Media: From Buzz to Brand Loyalty.” The purpose of this presentation was to share some real life examples of how large companies are using social media to bolster their brands online, whether they use social for awareness and PR, reputation management or even direct sales. That webinar will be put up on our website early next week for everyone to check out (in case you missed the live presentation). But there was one particular slide that we presented that got me to thinking this afternoon, that the new realities of web 2.0 and social media might one day render blogs as we know them obsolete. New services like Tumblr, Swurl and even Friend Feed track your online activity and summarizes it in one, easy-to-consume place on the web – often, in a blog style template. Think of these sites as automatically generated blogs that never need direct maintenance. Where does the content for your posts come from then? The photos you share, videos you upload, even the conversations you have are all aggregated. 
Take a look at Off Madison Ave’s Swurl page. This site brings our online presence on multiple sites together into one, convenient interface. (Friend Feed) does the same kind of thing. This site looks like a blog, but really isn’t. In fact, the posts from our official blog actually show up here as well. It isn’t blogging for the lazy. In fact, I’d argue services like Swurl and Tumblr are smarter for bloggers. You can still write posts, but now you can also seamlessly share other social interactions too. Social media is becoming more distributed every day. Our conversations are happening on dozens, if not hundreds, of different Web sites, all of which are fighting for our time and attention. So sites like these seem like a great idea to bring all of the different ways we communicate together. The question is – where does that leave blogging? Are traditional blogs preferable to this new breed of socially aggregated blogs? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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1 comment so far
Michelle Talsma says:
I think there will always be blogging like we know it in some form because people like to read (and write!) more content-heavy blogs. It's kind of like the effect of the web on newspapers - they still exist, but are a little different and perhaps a bit less popular. I at least hope traditional blogs continue to stay around because, as a writer, you can't keep everything to 140 characters.