There's an interesting meme that was picked up by Duncan Riley over at the Inquisitr earlier this evening with regard to the effect of FriendFeed on traditional blogging. It's an interesting meme and something I've been spending a not insignificant amount of time thinking about myself.

I'm in the midst of writing a long series of long posts for my personal blog on journalism with relationship to New Media, and I'm currently working on the subject of micro-blogging, and its role in the new and evolving ecosystem of for-profit online journalism.

That's why I've paid special attention to blog posts like the one Hematopoiesis put out this evening that say stuff like "FriendFeed is killing blogging." Duncan Riley disagreed that what Hematopoiesis argued was the case. I can see merits to both sides, and if you widen up the lens you look at the question with, you can see definite merit in both sides, plus some very interesting context.

Low-Impact Blogging? What's that? A few days ago, I wrote a fairly controversial article called 4 Questions for Early Adopters. In the piece, I suggested a method for selling fringe concepts like "status microblogging" services Twitter and FriendFeed as something I termed "low-impact blogging." That term is sort of the basis on how I see these services evolving into the mainstream.

It certainly isn't the only very clear path to mainstream, as Plaxo's union with Comcast and all the cross-overs that entails with physical objects that the cable company is putting in people's homes certainly qualifies for mainstream lifestreaming. But from an Internet user's perspective, there is very little else that is universally familiar like the concept of blogging, thanks to social networks like MySpace, Bebo and Facebook giving everyone a blogging platform with their socnet account.

Going back to the term, though, I see most of the folks who've taken up Twitter, FriendFeed, and other similar services drasticly decrease posting volume, but not to the expense of their substantive editorial or news based posts, it seems. A lot of the personal updates, questions to incite discussion and the observational posts shorten themselves and end up on the lifestream.

Certainly, to some, this can be seen as "killing blogging," as for many of us (myself included), personal diaries and journals were how we got started in blogging. If that's all you blog about, you could very easily see these services as something that will completely eclipse the medium.

FriendFeed, Drop.io, Twitter and Utterz as Meta-Platforms Something I've done with my personal website is to not just embed various lifestreaming and micro-blogging widgets on the site, but make a valiant effort to actually incorporate the output of these sites as part of the featured content.

Each item not only features the original content (or an inline frame referencing the original content), but the subsequent discussion about the content, making it actual inline (and monetizable) content for my site. Each discussion has a form at the bottom allowing site visitors (who have FriendFeed accounts) to participate in the discussion as they would on a blog post.

Even more promising is usage and implementation on the sites Utterz and Drop.io. Utterz is technically in the same space as FriendFeed and Twitter, though they've been around much longer (in fact, up until about April of this year, most traffic monitoring sources like Alexa and Compete ranked them very close to FriendFeed). Instead of going the route of siphoning off conversation from the blogosphere, their strategy was to inject it back in.

Utterz and Drop.io add an extra twist... With Utterz, you have the ability to post video, audio or text, and all posts are accompanied by an option to cross post it back to your blogging or distribution platform of choice. Utterz has a plethora of mobile posting options and an open API that functions almost identically to the Twitter and FriendFeed API (which is sure to lead to the inclusion of the service in tools like Twhirl or other microblogging stand-alone apps), and has the potential to completely eliminate the need to ever hit your blog or podcast interface.

It's an interesting spin and convergence of micro-blogging, chat, blogging and podcasting. Drop.io, I learned today, is also evolving in its usage, to a similar utility. It isn't tied into blogging platforms or syphoning off discussion from existing blogs like FriendFeed, but creating a new way to seamlessly build media. FriendFeed user Nathan Rein described today the way he's using it to effortlessly generate podcasts and teaching materials for his students:

Trying drop.io as an informal teaching journal. Set up a drop, and after each class, quickly phone-in notes and it becomes a podcast. This is even less fuss [than creating podcasts with Utterz], and it's a little more "private" in a way. At the moment I am (unless I'm mistaken) the only person listening to my "dropcast," and since it basically consists of notes for my own use that I want to keep in the cloud, no one else is likely to be interested in it. Thus a storage paradigm makes more sense than a blogging paradigm in this case.

Web 2.0 Apps are the New Distribution Tools Ultimately, most of this new media not being funneled into blogging is going to end up in the same places, but the means to create, distribute, and garner discussion on the media will be done with tools that better suit the process.

FriendFeed is superb at creating spur-of-the-moment discussions from a wide cross-section of folks on interesting ideas, blog posts, and bookmarked news items. Twitter, from a content producer's perspective, is a great research tool, and an even better way to market your media to folks who really care. Utterz is an excellent central meta-distribution platform. Drop.io, like Utterz, is also good at giving producers on the go a way to effortlessly build their media for slightly different applications.

In the end, most of this stuff can and will end up on the websites we've built originally to showcase our blog content, and the majority of it all ends up in an RSS feed at multiple points along the way.

In short, micro-blogging isn't killing traditional blogging, it's evolving it.