Jason Fry of The Wall Street Journal mulls over the current meme that blogging is on Death Row. Its demise has been grossly exaggerated, he concludes.

The conversation has centered around some very dubious statistics. Technorati’s 28 million blog index is known to be far short of the true picture. The Blog Herald has estimated a figure of 200 million — this takes in the astonishing number of blogs in China, plus other non-English-language blogs.

Moreover, if you go with the Technorati numbers, only 10 percent of them are regularly updated. Many more are just abandoned. One of my own abandoned blogs, ditched five months ago, still has a PR of 5 and appears on Google’s search page for the name, above that of the blog which replaced it. Lack of reliable statistics dog the blogosphere and attempts to make sense of it.

Gallup claims that 66 percent of Internet users say they never read blogs at all. But, says Fry, “Internet veterans may spy the factory-standard Blogger header or see Comments, Permalinks and Trackbacks and know they’ve landed on a blog, but this isn’t obvious to everybody — including, one imagines, Internet users being polled.” Gallup has admitted this distortion in their poll results.

Fry, who himself runs a successful baseball blog, concludes, “Reports of blogging’s demise are bosh, but if we’re lucky, something else really is going away: the by-turns overheated and uninformed obsession with blogging. Which would be just fine, because it would let blogging become what it was always destined to be: just another digital technology and method of communication, one with plenty to offer but no particular claim to revolution.

“My bet, he writes: Within a couple of years blogging will be a term thrown around loosely — and sometimes inaccurately — to describe a style and rhythm of writing, as well as the tools to publish that writing. This is already happening …”

He also thinks that big blog acquisitions were always destined to be a passing phase as media companies sought to jump on the bandwagon. Deals like Time Warner’s $25 million acquisition of Weblogs Inc. “will be emblematic of a brief, bygone time”. What he sees as “the failure of blogging to launch a huge number of well-heeled companies or keep attracting VC money” won’t be the last word on the subject.

” … blogging will no longer be a phenomenon. When people talk about it, they’ll often be referring to tools for putting up simple Web sites easily, or a certain style of Web publishing: brightly written, frequently updated and inviting reader conversation.”

And that last bit is what attracted me to blogging in the first place. Just because the dilettantes, the ships who pass in the night, and the simply-curious pass away from the scene, leaving a hard core of serious writers and publishers, doesn’t mean blogging will fade away. It will, in my view, be stronger. Good blogs will have larger audiences and attract better-paying advertising.

Blogging will become a true industry based around personal media techniques. We may have to change the name, though, and generically merge with other Internet information providers.

Then blogging really will be dead. But, as with Kings, we’ll cry, long live blogging.