Blogs are dead – long live the blog.

Yeah, I know, I’m slow to catch on sometimes. In reality, blogs aren’t dead, and probably won’t ever be now that they’ve become a part of the mainstream media, but the way people use blogs is changing. Twitter and Facebook have had a lot to do with this, but it’s not a stretch to include the idea that bloggers have just run out of things to say. Life is cyclical and unless you’re the type of person who is constantly trying new things, annual events and milestones recorded in a blog begin to look the same, especially to someone on the outside.

The “death of the blog” is likely to divide bloggers into two camps; the folks who bought into blogs as a social networking device, and who have since moved on to other, easier, quicker systems, and the “Slow Blog” fans for whom blogging is about the process of writing, editing and general thoughtfulness.

Slow blogging, based on the same premise as the Slow Food movement, is something I’ve apparently been espousing for years without even knowing it. I shut down my LiveJournal account recently because I really wasn’t feeling satisfied with the day-to-day updates about what my friends had eaten for lunch, or bought at the mall, or their terrible day at work. I found my own journal had become a depository for ranting and bitching – posts made without any thought given to whether they’d be interesting to read.

Slow blogging doesn’t mean to type slowly; it doesn’t even necessarily mean a decrease in the number of posts or in the overall quantity, although that tends to happen as slow bloggers wait until they have something they feel is meaningful to say before creating a post. Slow blogging, to me, is more about interesting, creative, thoughtful writing that inspires or provokes thought or discussion. Slow bloggers care about their message, not page ranks or hit statistics. I’d also guess that they are more likely to care about grammar, punctuation and tone.

Over on TasteTO, where we try to post 2 to 3 articles a day, writers are encouraged to take time with their posts, to check facts, to follow up interviews and to be organized enough that they get the piece written before their submission deadline so that they can set the piece aside for a day or two and come back to it with fresh eyes. The writers who do this invariably turn out better work, and the ones who are always late, rushing, and frantic are the ones who hand in stuff that is rife with factual mistakes, bad grammar and a tone so harried and sloppy that it’s obvious it was a rush job. It becomes a chore on a list, not a process that is at all joyful.

Does slow blogging create pressure to constantly turn out pearls of wisdom? Perhaps. But it also, in the long run, makes better writers – and editors. Not everything we have to say is going to be lauded as spectaular or earth-moving; and sometimes people are more interested in connecting on a more superficial basis, which is where systems like Twitter and Facebook work extremely well. But if bloggers stop making the effort to write decently, if we succumb to the urge to say everything in short blasts of 140 characters, then connecting actually becomes much more difficult. Our language dies. Our brains rot. We end up living in a world of immediate gratification and never feel the pride and accomplishment of creating a piece of writing worth reading.