In this month’s Wired magazine, Paul Boutin published a short piece about the death of blogs, and the evolution of egomaniacal self promotion and online publishing. The Economist had a similar piece, simultaneously declaring that blogging was both dead and too mainstream. Clearly, blogging isn’t what it used to be, but issuing the Death Certificate is dangerously premature.

Both of these articles indicate that the gritty, independent appeal of early blogs has been replaced by something more “corporate” and for folks who embodied the spirit of alternative media, this might as well be death. While that may be a little harsh, many of the most popular blogs now belong to companies and organizations, often with many writers pumping out several posts a day. While most individuals can’t keep up with that pace, blogging still offers them the opportunity to publish what they want, when they want.

People still blog. People still read blogs. More and more these days, people are using blog sites to publish news stories and for generic content management. And the most popular blogs are still alternative media, just more popular and better-read than they once were. While the numbers are down, and the dynamic is shifting, blogging is still very much alive.

Did rock n’ roll die when the record companies embraced it? What about when punk music ended up on a car commercial? Is blogging too anti-establishment that it stopped being cool when “the man” got in on it?

Regardless of what these articles say, Twitter will not replace blogging. The 140-character limit on a user’s answer to “What are you doing right now?” is not a substitute for well crafted, opinionated prose (into which bloggers often embed video, audio, and images). Facebook offers a slightly better substitute, but only publishes your notes to the folks a) with Facebook accounts and b) with permission to see your profile. A legitimate blog has no such limitations, which is why there are still millions of fully public blogs updated frequently, and millions of readers clicking on them everyday.

That doesn’t sound like death to me.