Blogs were great back in the days when pretty much all the content came from the “big companies”.  Blogs were a way for people to have their voice heard and to actually use the web interactively instead of just one-way.  It was no longer acceptable on the web to have a static web page in which you blasted out information about your product/company/etc and only update it once a year and have no way for the readers to interact with you and the content.  Blogs allowed us (and businesses) to update their sites non-stop and for discussions to be two-way.  They were the first step into the Web 2.0 world.

Today, blogs are just a pain to maintain – at least from my perspective.  It’s so much easier for me to Tweet my current thoughts via Twitter in 160 characters or less, or to update my Facebook status (and even then I’m wondering is Facebook is getting to be a little 2000 and late).  In a nutshell, I find that Twitter is giving me everything I need without taking up a lot of my time.  Even better, its allowing me to find the topics that interest me via a real-time search engine.  The important stuff bubbles to the top because of the re-tweeting taking place, and those people I trust the most I follow so I can always see what they have to say.

Now before I say blogs are dead and gone, let me state I do think that blogs still have a purpose.  After all, you can’t dive very deep into a subject when you are limited to 160 characters!  I think blogs are becoming the website instead of being a part of the website.  Take my site for example, sure I have this “blog” if you will on the front page – but really the entire site is a blog.  I’ve just adapted it to display the information I care about.  I might not update it for a month, or I may update it every day for a week – but the idea here is to share information that I want others to add to and use over time.

Compare this to Twitter where I am interested in sharing information and collaborating in real-time.  A year from now (or even a month from now) I am not interested in what happened on Twitter 30 days ago – I only want to know what is going on right here and right now.  A real-time search engine.

Blogs at one time were the public squares of our time – where everyone went to shout out their thoughts, opinions and advice.  Today that role has been taken over by Twitter – and instead of a lengthy speech we hoped a few people would read now have bullet points that we shout out to the crowds in short, digestible chunks.  Sort of like moving from a Microsoft Word document to a PowerPoint slide if you think about.