Blogging as a Social Media Platform

Believe it or not, Blogs have been one of the oldest forms of Social Media, invented much before the Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus brigade caught on in the past half a decade. For at its most basic sense, this is the barebones definition of Social Media...

...is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, and voice over IP, to name a few.

And Blogs pioneered the concept before the aforementioned websites hit the scene and proceeded to explode in varying degrees over time. Initially known as web logs, it was a format which early Internet users could use on a daily basis to put out personal thoughts on a public forum and await feedback - be it email responses, comments or simply, views!

The most redeeming features of Blogs - of any kind - that you’ll notice is the hawk-like emphasis on content. Not just user-generated chatty content, but the production of content that is an alternative to traditional media AND that benefits from interlinked conversation and comments. Maybe the fact that “old media” has co-opted those aspects of blogs is the reason that some people no longer see blogging as social media, which is quite frankly, a mistake.

Of course, The blog-o-sphere is not easy to conquer. Due to a moderately high level of competition, a blogger cannot merely sustain the profession after a while, so has to morph into a Blogger and Marketer and SEO pro. Suffice to say, that's a lot of work to ensure that their blog gains more traffic (if not gain, at least sustain the traffic it gets). And on top of it, bloggers have a 9 to 5 jobs so articles have to be churned out in the limited amounts of time that he or she does get.

We'll leave you with an ironic chunk of news. A few years ago, a popular Canadian author claimed that he is quitting Social Media and proceeded to give his reasons why. But he goes on to state that he’ll continue to produce content on his own blog. So what exactly is he quitting? What do you think? ;)