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.

Here is very interesting seminar on Social Media by Mike Wesch of Kansas State University who produced the popular video ‘web 2.0 – what is and how to use it’ – you can watch this video in our favourites at w00tonomyTV.

Using YouTube as a case study it looks at why social media had become such a phenomenom in the world by appealing to humans need for individualism and community. Interestingly the audience demographics for YouTube for over 35 are 25%, the same as 12 -17 year olds; the largest group is 18 -24 year olds at 50%.

It is an academic video so you may not wish to watch it all the way through but the first 20 minutes is a very entertaining introduction to Social Media with examples of the viral effects of videos in Youtube – look out for the dance with the prisoners from the Phillippines.

Also for those of you who want to really understand ‘what social networks mean’ without the technical jargon he provides a very clear way to explain it all

• YouTube is user generated content
• Digg is user generated filtering
• del.icio.us is user generated organisation
• Technorati is user generated commentary

Hope you enjoy it!

[youtube TPAO-lZ4_hU]