Blogging needs to come back, in a big way.
Or maybe it already has — Medium et al.
Yeah Twitter is cool. It did “disrupt” blogging. What was an offshoot of blogging has become a protocol for communication in less than a decade. Directly or indirectly, it permeated everywhere. Hashtags, @mentions, following people, short updates — these features make up most social services we use today. And Twitter has a great future ahead. Maybe something will offshoot from Twitter and go on to become almost as defining as Twitter. Among tons of cool applications this worldwide feed can enable, I find the ones related to governments and cities most significant. Stuff we have today in those areas only scratches the surface of what could be done. Wait till the internet of things starts adding and tapping to this feed.
But it hasn’t replaced blogging and won’t. The 140 chars is too imposing of a limit, if the “tweetstorm” is any evidence. Opinions are important and sometimes just can’t be made that concise.
We just need tools to adapt to today’s computing landscape. And I don’t simply mean mobile. I mean compatibility with tools people use for editing text, storage services, web sites. Offline and online access. Dead-simple tools that enable blogging from anywhere at any time. These will almost certainly be new tools. They might already exist. They will stage blogging’s comeback.