The Future of Blogging

The digital world is gravitating towards an unknown future. With so many blogs on various platforms, there is no dearth of content, but there is more pouring in every second. Not only written, but the emergence of vlogs are also becoming popular on YouTube. This is how blogs are transforming, and taking a course of popularity with such innovations.

Earlier blogs had readers, now they have viewers too. It will be interesting to see how the two contrasting type of content survives. Is it the end for lengthy blogs? Only time will tell! The blogging world was quite compact and very few actually took to blogging, but now it has become a stronger medium to communicate and it has become bigger than anyone could have predicted.

The blogging phenomenon is not only an opportunity for writers, but also for creative professionals and businesses to garner attention to their area of expertise. All this is true, but it is noticeable that the quality of content is a cause of concern. While some of the bloggers are shortening their content, because readers’ are complaining about “too long did not read”; which has been abbreviated to ‘TLDR’. Interesting!

In fact, it is a concern if a writer/blogger should give in to the increasing demand for shorter content and still convey the type of message it was intended to. I believe, that sometimes the nature of topics requires a blogger to write a lengthy essay to justify its significance. It’s not always preferable to write bulleted lists with a headline that goes like this, ‘5, 10, 50 Interesting things to Learn About Blogging’… in my opinion it seems that the blogger is is a hurry to publish a post with some collated content from the huge internet repository. The problem with it is that we seem to find ‘convenience’ and ‘what’s in it for me’ and ‘why should I spend time reading a lengthy blog?’

While we all argue over good content, all this contraction of content is weakening the foundation of a blog. Even to produce a good vlog, one has to write an interesting script. You cannot replace content or curtail their importance even with the emergence of ‘brevity is here to rule’. One cannot diminish the importance of quality content and to maintain that, one has to justify a blog with necessary content.

It is true we cannot deny the lure of trends, but sometimes it is judicious to defy them to sustain that intensity and seriousness of blogging (be it any medium). Do not allow trends to fashion/tailor your content uncomfortably. 

As a creative professional, you should not feel that you have compromised with the content and your ability to put in some extra effort to the nature of content. If a trend becomes a black hole where your content is forcibly absorbed without any impact, then it is time to introspect as a blogger.

Never consider a blog and blogging to be an extension of Social Media. It is a content-based medium where it finds a special place in the digital world. Do not dilute blogging with the culture of social media. You can promote your blog on social media (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, Google+… and many more) but importing that concept to blogging to ease the content of any value is a mistake. The future of blogging is to evolve and become a knowledge-based medium.

~Amitav

More about Blogging-

https://amitavchowdhury.wordpress.com/2016/11/26/10-blogging-etiquette/