Last week, a Wired story claiming blogs are dead hit the web. According to the author, Valleywag reporter Paul Boutin, blogging is passé, made up of nothing more than mainstream media and marketing campaigns. He points to the fact that former big-time bloggers like Jason Calacanis and Robert Scoble have ditched blogging in favor of platforms like Twitter and Flickr – a move the author takes as indication the general masses will, or should, follow suit (a theory Mathew Ingram takes to the mat in his post). Boutin’s recommendation for newbie bloggers is to pull the plug and instead invest time expressing themselves in places like Facebook or Twitter. It would appear expressing oneself via the written word (past 140 characters that is) is apparently too old school for the web.

Or is it? Ironically, there’s nothing like a ‘blogging’s dead!’ story to get people blogging. And, boy did a lot of people have pretty strong reactions to this story. By the way, these aren’t Silicon Valley tech insiders, but bloggers on all topics, from finance to the environment, to folks maintaining personal blogs who happened to see the story online. Most bloggers dismissed the blogs are dead theory as ridiculous. In fact, the number one most influential post for the query we ran in BuzzLogic (from Virtual Economics) referred to the Wired story as the “Most Flagrant Flamebait Ever.”

What is true is the social web has grown to support a diverse set of self expression needs, and different people use what makes sense for them, often times in tandem. A blogger may choose to leverage Twitter for an observation one moment, and do a full blog post later. Or, he may opt to Tweet the full post once published. Applications like FriendFeed and platforms like Facebook are making it possible to centralize blogging, along with other forms of self expression, in one place. This is not the death of blogging – quite the opposite. It’s the evolution.

In Silicon Valley we tend to get caught up in a specific world view – one that often times isn’t representative of the world at large. To that end, today BuzzLogic released results of a study that attempted to examine how mainstream readers of blogs feel about blog content. JupiterResearch (now part of Forrester) conducted the BuzzLogic-sponsored survey of more than 2,000 US consumers. So, do consumers reading blogs think the platform is dead?

It sure doesn’t seem that way. Since 2004, there has been a 300 percent spike in monthly readership. What’s more, unlike other platforms, blogs aren’t just a means of connecting and communicating. Blog content itself is uniquely powerful. Those smaller, lesser known voices discouraged by the Wired piece are collectively responsible for a pretty formidable shift in the media landscape. Not only that, they play a key role in shaping their readers’ buying decisions.

Some of our key findings include:
• Blogs influence purchases: One half (50 percent) of blog readers say they find blogs useful for purchase information.
• Blogs sway more purchases among readers than social networks: More frequent blog readers say they trust relevant blog content for purchase decisions than content from social networking sites.
• Niche focus ups influence factor: For those who have found blog content useful for product decisions, more than half (56 percent) said blogs with a niche focus and topical expertise were key sources.
• Blogs go beyond tech: Outside of technology-related purchases, for which 31 percent of readers say blogs are useful, other key categories include media and entertainment (15 percent); games/toys and/or sporting goods (14 percent); travel (12 percent); automotive (11 percent); and health (10 percent).
You can read the details in our press release, found here.

So bloggers, no need to lay your blogs to rest yet. People are hungry for fresh perspective, new ideas and insights. Blogging is far from over; rather, it’s just starting to hit its stride.