Is Lifestreaming killing Blogging?

I have been a fan of Copyblogger since quite some time now and love the way Brian creates great content. One of Brian’s recent post discusses whether blogs are a part of the social media or not. While reading his post, a new thought triggered my brain. The thought was, “whether lifestreaming has killed blogging?”

I remember, around 12 months ago, people were crazy about getting a free blog from Blogger or Wordpress. Blogging allowed them to express themselves and gave them great satisfaction, since they were sharing their feelings with the world. But with time things change. While some bloggers remained active, others dropped out, simply because they did not generate enough readership to keep the comments and conversation rolling. The resulting frustration was enough for them to never look back at their blog, again.

And today, with tools like Twitter, Friendfeed, Posterous, etc. lifestreaming has appealed to masses. People prefer to use these services because it takes less time to express yourself. It also allows them to track real time updates and helps in establishing a connection easily. Sometimes, there are things which one cannot express on a blog regularly, say like what I had for lunch or at what time do I exercise, etc. But with lifestreaming, all these things are possible as you can pass on the crappiest of your act to the bunch of people who have nothing better to do than admire your updates.

Don’t get me wrong but I have lived both blogging and lifestreaming. And somehow blogging makes me more happy as I can target my posts in such a way that they benefit my readers.

I was very surprised when Steve Rubel quit blogging to embrace lifestreaming. I somehow just fail to understand how someone can get his message through just 140 characters. Maybe that’s one of the tricks that I need to master to increase my twitter following!

Chris Brogan’s explains this scenario by drawing an analogy between the two by saying - “There’s a difference between making a meal and grabbing a snack. Eating only snacks can lead to us getting flabby.“

Lifestreaming does provide more speed and action to a conversation than blogging but sometimes this can go offtrack. Its like somebody starts discussing about a football match, praises the team coach, digs his personal history and the discussion moves on. As you can see in this case, the conversation about the match lost its importance, maybe because the history of the coach was more attractive. With blogging this condition will never arise as it contains a targeted message.

To conclude, I would re-iterate that I prefer to blog than lifestream. What about you?

Source ::
by Sameer
http://www.provenseo.com/2009/07/when-does-google-ban-penalize-or-sandbox-a-website/