With the popularity of Twitter (aka microblogging) growing daily, I’ve heard many people discuss the end of the blog. The theory is that the blog will become obsolete as people start getting their user-generated content and news from Twitter, Facebook, and other forms of snippet communication services. Well, that’s ridiculous.

At my recent MBA graduation I had the pleasure of hearing Sidney Harman, founder of Harman Kardon industries, as the commencement speaker. Mr. Harman graduated from Baruch in 1939 (that’s right. 70 years ago!). He spoke about the art of writing. Particularly how he reads to learn things but writes to learn what he knows. In essence, only by writing something down can he bring out the thoughts in his mind that he would have otherwise never accessed.

I can attest to this. I too have found that the act of writing requires a thought process that accesses areas of my mind that I never would have ventured to otherwise. Sometimes it’s a struggle but this act of writing requires a balance of focus and will that isn’t replicated in other actions.

Twittering, on the other hand, is not writing. It’s an art form all its own (well most of it is trash, like most writings, but some are actually interesting). But writing, it is not. The, sometimes mindless, way people communicate with the world via Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed or whatever, is not writing. It’s surface writing. There isn’t any depth. There isn’t any thought process. It’s whatever pops off the surface of their mind like a brain fart. It has its usefulness, but it can’t replace real honest thought.

So which blogs will suffer from this new microblogging phenomenon? The ones that are, themselves, just long brain farts. Most blogs are a waste of space. They take a piece of news that can be said in one sentence and stretch it out to four paragraphs. Those blogs can easily be replaced by the tweet “Palm Pre to launch days before Apple WWDC”. Does that kind of information really need four paragraphs to discuss?

Many blogs actually put some thought into what they write (I certainly try to). Those are the blogs (I hope) that still have relevance in this new world of micromush tweetering.