Eight years into blogging at Abnormal Returns we have seen bloggers, blog platforms and the like come and go. Last year we asked out loud “Where did all the finance bloggers go?” There were any number of responses, many of which focused on the atomization of the social graph. In short, there are a lot more different ways to get your viewpoints across these days.

In the past week two of the more eminent long-time bloggers, Om Malik and Jason Kottke, have weighed in on the issue of the “death of blogs.” Not surprisingly they both note has the DNA of the blog has helped launch any number of services like Twitter and Facebook which we lump together as ‘social media.’ Om Malik at GigaOM writes:

Blogging used to have blogrolls, link blogs, photo sharing, videos and even status updates. Status updates and link sharing are two behaviors crucial to Twitter, and photo sharing is as commonplace today as Starbucks cafes. We formed relationships, we followed people on blogs, now we do that on Instagram, Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook and every other service.

Jason Kottke writing at Nieman Journalism Lab* is on the same wavelength:

So, R.I.P. The Blog, 1997-2013. But this isn’t cause for lament. The Stream might be on the wane but still it dominates. All media on the web and in mobile apps has blog DNA in it and will continue to for a long while. Over the past 16 years, the blog format has evolved, had social grafted onto it, and mutated into Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest and those new species have now taken over. No biggie, that’s how technology and culture work.

Both Malik and Kottke acknowledge that blogs aren’t dead. They are changing and evolving like everything else on the Internet. However if you want to make an argument and need more than 140 characters, which is often the case in finance and investments, there is still no substitute for the blog.

*Kottke has some additional insights in an introductory piece worth reading, where else, at his blog.

 

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