By Darren Leroux

I recently attended an event in New York City with a number of colleagues  discussing the relative merits of Social Media.

There’s no doubt the world’s a changing – but one discussion in particular really struck a chord with me. Is blogging just a fad, waiting to disappear quietly into that good night?

Don’t get me wrong, we heard it straight from Jeff Jarvis, blogging is changing the world as we know it, bloggers will rule the world and traditional media will go the way of the Dodo.

But it’s the one discussion I had with a colleague about the ‘fad’ factor that continues to linger on in my head. The discussion we had focused around the early mass-popularity of the Internet, when everyone and their mother were creating personal Web pages (admittedly, I was no different). GeoCities , Angelfire and others prospered, creating these virtual communities of people and what interested them.

It didn’t last. These personal sites were abandoned as the novelty of it wore off… search engines spewed out gross numbers of page search results with abandoned sites listed everywhere. Granted they eventually put policies in place to root out, clean-up and remove outdated, deserted, personal shrines.

Which brings us to today – I can’t help wonder if blogging is following this same trend. Inevitably, millions of voices will grow quiet as the novelty wears off. What this will leave us with can likely be put into two categories: an elite group fanatically dedicated to publishing their every thought; or a group of socially charged, timely, new age publishers delivering clear insight, opinion and value to their readership.
 
The same argument can be made for sites like Tech Know and Collective Conversation as a whole. Are we simply the act of a savvy PR company trying to capitalize on a growing fad and look ‘hip and trendy’?

The ideal, and hopefully right, answer is no.

We like to think of ourselves in the second category - providing clear insight, opinion and value to our readership of colleagues, clients and anyone else who happens to stumble across our happy community on the Web.

Blogs such as this are a new tool in our arsenal of communications, one that will help us to better understand, relate to and target the new segment of citizen journalist. The ability to understand these new age writers and help clients reach out and communicate with these new media channels will be a requirement, not an option for any truly successful communications organization.