A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.These markets are conversations.

The Cluetrain Manifesto

According to a recent Wired article by Paul Boutin, blogging is dead. Interestingly, I read a similar article in French financial paper ‘Echos’ a couple of years ago that also predicted the end of blogs… and guess what? I read around 120 active blogs on a daily basis! The blogosphere is healthier than ever, and to quote Paul, the ‘amateur wordsmiths’ are in fact an amazing community to learn from!

Whilst I agree that the blogosphere can be littered with dead blogs, or a ‘a tsunami of paid bilge’, there are thousands of amazing active weblogs out there.

New tools such as Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed or Facebook complement blogs but will never replace them. I use Twitter and Facebook to consolidate my existing relationship with bloggers, but 140 characters will never replace a blog post!

Twitter, FriendFeed and Flickr offer threaded conversations making it easy to reply to comments and interact with other users. Admittedly blogs are still a little behind when it comes to keeping track of ‘comments box’ conversations, but this is rapidly changing with the introduction of plugins such as phreadz, cocomments, or new kid on the block comment reply via email, which are turning blogs into interactive conversational tools.

It looks like quite a few members of the blogosphere disagree with Paul. I even  wonder whether this article wasn’t written as a link bait;  Technorati picked up 466 blog reactions (negative one would hope) to this very article.

On a different note, I’d like to welcome Rax to the blogosphere! There are still quite a few passionate bloggers out there after all ;)

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