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A recent column in another newspaper asked whether the “long tail” of blogging was dying off. It made me question whether blogging’s long tail was ever alive in the first place.

The argument was that statistical and anecdotal research indicated the vast majority of existing blogs had not been updated for at least 120 days and that amateur bloggers seem to have shifted to Facebook and Twitter, the social networking websites.

But surely the activity of these blogs – let alone their present inactivity – has never been of any real consequence.

An great post/article. It’s interesting, the professional blog is suffering from what many organizations do, people want content, they want useful/helpful/informative or funny content, but that requires investment, money and time, you can be supported by advertising, by google ads, or direct sponsorship to help with costs, but ultimately the challenge remains, good content costs good money.

One of the blogs I was speaking to a few months ago that stopped was saying that covering one event might cost 30% of their revenue if they introduced video/podcast etc. The old statement, why don’t you go to more conferences? Firstly I loose income, secondly I typically have to pay, making attending conferences vastly expensive.

Then there was the analyst I spoke to who said, “oh blog, easy make people pay for the content, sign up for a monthly fee”, you get free content and the public content – but who determines what is free and what is not? How do I manage subscriptions and as a member of the cheap seats, pay, you mean actually pay to know how to configure an ILO, let me get google, there must be another site.

Where I see the value in blogging though is in two direct ways, firstly for the vendor/service provider to communicate their message and to be able to ‘ramble on’ and still have that, “that’s a blog comment, not corporate policy”, to be able to question direction, products to reach out to people and convert support comments/known issues into a post searchable format.  Added to this though where the blog/site even comes into play is in communicating and solving issues, from the Bentley owners club to the all those virtualization blogs talking about patching ESX or how to get it working just write, this real life content is just that real life, it’s what people are encountering, the real issues from end user perspective which are invaluable to the vendors/service providers in adding value and creating opportunity. This goes back to that question of the blogs I want to subscribe to, the vendor support one, with real calls and issues being identified/resolved, as well as jobs at insert company name..

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