Every few weeks I scan the Ad Age 150 – a comprehensive list of industry blogs indexed based on popularity and relevance.  They index over 1000 blogs, and the top 150 have been published annually in their magazine.

Two things really stuck with me yesterday

1. Seth Godin‘s blog had dropped from first to 28th.  His blog ranking has recovered this morning to second spot – but the fact he is no longer on top of the blogsphere is a seismic shift from the last three years
2. The number three blog Micro Persuasion (also consistently in the top 5) has declared his blog dead. He’s walking away from impressive rankings in Alexa, Technorati, Google, Post rank,Yahoo, and Collective Intellect in order to start a new site he’s calling  The Steve Rubel Lifestream – which is really just another blog, but with a new POV that instead of writing long articles supported by several references he will post snack sized bits of information several times a day.
   

Looking at my 300 subscriptions in my RSS feed, nearly half the blogs have either stopped posting or at least reduced their frequency. Although I wrote about 5 reasons why twitter is making many blogs irrelevant here, I think it would be a mistake for people to abandon their blog in favour of a micro-blog such as twitter or a feed aggregator such as friendfeed.

Given that the most important brand you ever work on should be your own, your blog should evolve to be more than an opinion site, but one that aggregates and presents your personal brand. I was speaking to my friend Ted last night about this, and it makes a lot of sense. It’s also something I’ve intuitively done over the last year with this site.

CVs are dead – long live your personal brand aggregator!

Instead of killing your blog in favour of another platform, use your blog as the platform to other branches of your personal brand. Linkedin for business networking, slideshare for presentations, twitter for the in the moment perspectivce, facebook for the more personal connections, and youtube for videos.

While you’re at it, be sure to include a “share this” widget so that others can easily share your awesome content with their network and be sure your blog is mobile friendly – as increasingly your fans or those who stumble upon your site will be accessing it from their smartphones.

It would seem that blogs are in fact undead.

A funny thing has happened over the last six months – many of the blogs I’ve been following have gone silent while at the same time the amount of chatter on and about Twitter has been manic.

Has Twitter killed the blog?

I must admit, it’s often way easier to post a small sound bite with a link rather than spend an hour or two to write a full post on a topic.  Twitter has a few inherent advantages over most blogs:

1. Unlike most personal blogs, you can scale up your twitter following very quickly. Go out and find 1000 or so like-minded people (or at least people who are interested in your industry or topic) and most will return the favour and follow you back.  This is especially appealing for those who have a small technorati rating of 1 or 2 – which essentially says nobody knows about your blog and even fewer visit
2. Most new bloggers hit a wall after a few weeks or months of posting… they just run out of things to say. With twitter you only need to throw out a zinger with a tinyurl and you can say you’ve contributed to the conversation that day…. which is why twitter is classified as a micro-blog.  
3. Twitter feels more like a community than most blogs. With hash tags and hundreds of Twitter tools, you can reach out, engage, follow and feel part of the conversation no matter where you are. Blogs only really feel like communities when you get a ton of comments… which is really hard for the majority of blogs to get.
4. It’s easier to follow somebody’s tweets on mobile than trying to load their blog into your mobile web browser. Most people haven’t figured out that there are some pretty nifty RSS readers for mobile so they just don’t bother
5. It’s the cool thing to do right now. Just as everybody had to have a blog a few years ago, everybody needs to be on twitter. You can’t call yourself a social media guru / expert / subject matter expert without being on twitter.  

Having a regular tweet schedule has certainly impacted the frequency of my own blog articles – although integrating my tweets into this blog (right column) has allowed me to keep the conversation going between posts – which was kind of the point of twitter in the first place.

After each new post on this site, there is a natural spike in traffic from those who have subscribed to this site via RSS. Traffic increases again significantly when I tag items for facebook newsfeeds. So much so, that it’s now part of my post-publish routine. Friends and colleagues more often refer to my “facebook feeds” than their own RSS feeds.

Call it the natural beacon effect?

Whatever you want to call it, as a blogger or marketer you need to incorporate a facebook strategy as part of your overall marcom plan. 

Blogger tip: Add social bookmarking to your blog template so that people can tag your article to their favorite tool. Also include a twitter push so that everytime an article is published you will automatically tweet your followers with link.

Just as marketers are finally figuring out what the heck facebook is and why they should be embracing the platform as a way of reaching & engaging their customers and potential customers, there is a new trend developing that may impact facebook and other social mediums…

Enter social aggregators.

Aggregators won’t replace facebook – but much like RSS feeds have supplemented users visting websites directly, social aggregator services could mean marketers looking to reach and engage people through social media sites like facebook will find a smaller direct audience to engage with.

I’ve signed up with socialthing and others are raving about feedfriend. Both do about the same thing – they take updates from all your social media sites like flickr, facebook, twitter, yelp, linkedin and stream them as one interface in something called a “lifestream.”

The idea is great – instead of checking for updates on multiple sites, you can get them all at once – much like how i use Netvibes or Protopage to aggregate all my RSS feeds.

Personally I get everything I need from Netvibes. 

I can add twitter or facebook status updates to Netvibes… and i don’t really care for the extra features social aggregators include such as comments on the different feeds. When I also consider the fact that most of my friends aren’t as geeked out as I am on ‘web 2.0′, it makes even less sense. Just getting my friends on facebook was a monumental task.

Having said that, the mobile interface for Socialthing is a thing of beauty.

They also have an optimized interface for the iphone which makes checking out lifestreams on the go a pleasant experience.

I have a hard enough time keeping up with my RSS feeds (270 currently) – I’m not sure I have enough time (or care enough) to follow the lifestream of every person i know. Having said that, it could be really useful if you are stalking following a few choice people…

How can marketers get in on this?

Websites got around a similar issue when RSS feeds became popular by not including all the content in the feed – so users who liked the lead content were driven back to the site… where sponsored ads could be displayed in all their glory.

One suggestion – build your own branded social aggregator…. and include your own relevant content as one of the feeds.

I could see this working really well for Automotive, Financial, Pharma, Retail… well pretty much any brand looking to participate in & influence a person’s lifestream.

Nearly a month ago I decided to launch a new blog – but this one would be focused on the ski industry. I spend a significant amount of time on snow in the winter – and usually a few weeks in the summer too. I’ve enjoyed writing for this blog so much; I figured it would be double the fun to add a second.

Thanks to the power of the interweb 2.0, it literally only takes about five minutes to setup your own blog through a free service like blogger and wordpress.  Unlike in the old days, sites are now longer built as stand-alone pieces of art. Sites today are built on content management system (CMS) which means that content lives separately from the function and design of your website. This means you can update the “theme” of your website easily and quickly without affecting your content.  Before CMS based websites, you had to update each page seperately offline or by playing with page masters in web developer applications such as dreamweaver. It used to take me hours or days to roll out a new site theme. Now it can take seconds.  

A CMS website also means you can repurpose your content for other purposes – like setting up RSS feeds or creating a mobile version of your site. Want to learn more about this? Check out this classic:

After registering a new domain for my ski blog and auto-installing the blog scripts, all I had to do was pick a theme and I would be ready to add my voice to the ski industry online. I started by doing a google search for “wordpress templates.”

Within 5 minutes of research I forgot about my ski blog and found myself drifting towards a new theme for this blog.

Three weeks, 50 sites, and over 1,000 themes reviewed later, I was thrilled to activate a new theme…for this blog over the weekend.

Although it’s really easy to update your theme, the hard part is finding one that matches your brand and the tone you’ve established with your published articles. It’s taken me nearly a month to land on the current theme…so I hope you like it. 

Now back to that ski blog…