But not really.

Back in 2007, Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion argued that Shiny Object Syndrome and the attention crash mean that people were focusing on social networking tools rather than traditional blogs.

Charles Arthur of the Grauniad has pitched in with a piece based on the decline in inbound links to the site’s technology section from blogs. After dramatically – and incorrectly – declaring that “blogging is dying”, he qualifies his statement by saying he’s talking about the “long tail of blogging” – meaning that while big, “serious” blogs are still going strong, the mass of small blogs by ordinary people is shrinking.

Where is everybody? Anecdotally and experimentally, they’ve all gone to Facebook, and especially Twitter. At least with Twitter, one can search for comments via backtweets.com – though it’s still quite rare for people to make a comment on a piece in a tweet; more usually it’s a “retweet”, echoing the headline.

Of course, it all comes down to what you actually mean by “blogging”. Does it mean producing a website using a blogging CMS or would a more appropriate definition be posting content online in a user-friendly way?

From the latter perspective, no part of blogging is dying. It’s just happening somewhere else. To paraphrase Clay Shirky “behaviour first, technology second”. What matters is what people are doing, not the tools they are using.

Because what’s happening is not down to a change in user behaviour. Vast numbers of people continue to post material online. But booming numners are doing so on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube rather than WordPress or Blogger. This does not mean the demise of blogging CMSs either. WordPress especially is evolving into a powerful publishing tool suitable for everything from a n00b blog to a complex commercial site. Crucially, blogging platforms offer plenty of tools to tie in social networking activity.

Thanks to these multiple platforms people are posting and engaging more than they ever have. And here’s an example of some wonderful content posted not on a blog but on YouTube. Enjoy.

Lo and behold, the UK is about to receive the first commercial phone that runs Google’s much talked about Android operating system.

However, the T-Mobile G1 is not a Google Phone. The hardware has nothing to do with Google. The operating system happens to be Android. There are two drawbacks to this.

1) The hardware is nothing like as downright lovely as the iPhone – both in terms of looks and usability. (Fold-out keyboards are sooooooooo 2005.)

2) The exciting thing about Android is that it is designed to be used as a platform for other people to create cool applications for. This has not happened yet and the smart money says we won’t see the jaw-dropping functionality being developed on the Android platform for at least a year.

Our verdict: Android will soon be available on better phones than the G1. Also, wait 12 months before getting an Android phone and you’ll see it loaded with some truly amazing gizmos. In the meantime, stick to the iPhone.

We are now even more convinced the iPhone will change the world.

This is not because we have been seduced by its good looks and supereasy user interface- though we have.

Nor is it because of the recent unveiling of the 3G iPhone. It was an expensive flawed device before its new features were announced. After them it will be a slightly less flawed, slightly less expensive device.

But we were never wowed by the iPhone because of its technology. We predicted that it would change mobile because of Apple’s marketing clout and the effect that would have on Apple’s competitors. If you disagree, try to remember how many people owned MP3 players pre the iPod.

What’s got us buzzing now is the news that the iPhone is changing how users behave.

According to no less a source than Google, 50 times more search requests come from Apple iPhones than any other mobile handset.

If other mobiles also make web access a common feature (and they are), Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations, believes the number of mobile searches could soon be greater than the number of web searches.

User behaviour is changing again. We had Web 2.0, now mobile becomes a major platform. Search will be a major driver. And search engine optimisation is moving towards “natural search”, ie looking at the words on the page.

Is your content ready. Would you like it to be?

For Marc Davis, Yahoo’s social media guru, there’s no doubt that the future is about mobility – with the number of handsets about to hit 4 billion.

We are about 18 months from an incredible boom in mobile applications and mobile adoption Mike Butcher, TechCrunch

“The mobile web is not just about accessing the web from your phone. Mobile phones that are location aware, temporarily situated and socially connected will transform our experience of the web, the world and ourselves.”

“The next web,” he says “will be about place and time.”

He suspects that we are near the point at which more people will be able to access the web via their phone than their desk top computer.

work with w00t to market your content in time and space in the emerging world wide social web.

more more more on http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7366403.stm

That’s a lot of work to get a lot of traffic for not much cash. That’s a key problem for commercial publishers online. Another key problem is the way that online has moved in the past two years or so.

Thanks to the phenomenon known as Web 2.0, the focus has shifted to individual items of content not to where they are displayed. Blogs, RSS feeds, widgets, wikis, social network and umpteen other phenomena take content out of its context and share, manipulate and distribute it in more ways than seem possible. If the content is interesting enough, that is.

This presents a bijout problemette for commercial content producers. While it’s great to have lots of people reading their stories or watching their videos it’s hard to generate revenue unless you can drag those users under an advertising banner or beside a sponsor’s logo. This mission is not impossible but it is damn hard.

But this is all great news if your aim is not to make money from attracting people but to demonstrate value for money and getting the right message out there. And this is where the public sector wins big, especially when it comes to delivering public service messages.

Online is now about distribution and content. If you can embed your message in interesting content then the natural flow of the web will take it to the people for you.

Now there is an answer. Take some dots. Join them up. Here are the numbers for how many devices people use globally:

Macs: 30+ million

PCs: 300+ million

Mobile phones: 3+ billion

Ladies and gentlemen, we have winner. And it’s in your pocket.

We know that not all of these users are browsing the Internet. But year on year with each wave of annual upgrades this is changing.

The implication for marketers and agencies out there is obvious for anyone who has tried to look at a page on a small screen. The importance of web design pales into insignificance against the usability, quality and format of the content.

To cater for your customers need to find content easily on a mobile device the prominence of your visual branding must be reduced. So the question is how do we convey the values and identity of our organisation – through our content.