Last week it was a New York Magazine article on A-Listers, this week it will likely be this article from Slate on the impending ‘death of blogs’ that gets everyone upset.

As a cultural phenomenon, blogs are in their gangly adolescence. Every day, thousands of people around the world launch their blogs on LiveJournal or the Iranian equivalent. But as businesses, blogs may have peaked. There are troubling signs—akin to the 1999 warnings about the Internet bubble—that suggest blogs have just hit their top.

Give me a break. Which ‘business’ blogs are we talking about, those like Gawker that make their money off advertising, or a company that creates a blog to better communicate with its customers? The latter is where you’ll see real growth in blogging moving forward. At this point very few companies have blogs, and even fewer have good ones. The blogging party isn’t over, for many companies it hasn’t even started yet.

That’s not to say that blogs won’t eventually be phased out and replaced by something more efficient, because they will. Blogs don’t allow for a free exchange between the customer and the company, ie a true conversation. But they do make it much easier for the two sides to communicate, which is why they are such a valuable tool.

Over time, companies will gain an understanding of blogs and how to implement them as a way to effectively communicate with consumers. With this understanding will come the realization that blogs can be improved upon. First, as stated earlier, they don’t allow for a free two-way communication. Second, they are located in the company’s yard. Both of these characteristics favor the company, not the consumer.

My guess is the next step beyond blogs will be a vehicle that lets companies interact and converse with consumers on a one-on-one basis in a time and place that’s convenient to the customer.

How does this come about? I have no idea, I’m just a dumb blogger. But I am smart enough to know that blogs will have to at least get past their infancy before it’s time to bury them.

UPDATE: Adpulp caught this gem, The Financial Times decided to get in the game, so they wrote their version of the death of the blogosphere. Then they close the article with: “Talk to Trevor Butterworth and have your say at the blog set up to discuss this story: ftmagblog.blogspot.com“. That’s right, blogs are so dead, and so over that a brand new blog has to be created to handle the influx of comments from readers of an article about them. Snicker.

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