Appar­ent­ly it’s that time of year again. The days grow short­er, the nights grow chill­i­er, and we bemoan the death of blogging.

As some­one who’s now well into my third decade of blog­ging, It’s fun­ny read­ing the respons­es. Peo­ple are talk­ing about mar­kets or about how it’s not the same since big mon­ey stopped sub­si­diz­ing the blog­ging infrastructure.

When blogs start­ed they were incred­i­bly under the radar. We didn’t have big audi­ences — didn’t real­ly expect them — and we weren’t try­ing to mon­e­tize or brand our­selves. We were telling sto­ries. They were text, they were pic­tures, some­times they were videos and audio. For my first few years of blog­ging I resist­ed even call­ing it that because the term was so asso­ci­at­ed with a kind of self-focused hot take.

Accord­ing to one recent sur­vey, Word­Press is pow­er­ing 34% of the pub­lic inter­net. That’s not bad for a dead medi­um. If any­thing is RIP, it’s a nar­row def­i­n­i­tion of blog­ging. I’d argue that any cre­ative con­tent that is reg­u­lar­ly post­ed and dis­played in a time­line is a kind of blog. When I start­ed blog­ging in 1997, I was hand cod­ing every­thing. But now there’s a gazil­lion ser­vices that all look and feel dif­fer­ent but have a dis­tinct blog­ging DNA.

Peo­ple use Face­book to blog. When peo­ple unroll a Twit­ter for Thread Read­er App, it shows just how blog­gy Twit­ter is. Reddit’s the com­ment sec­tion of a blog large­ly divorced from a blog. Instagram’s noth­ing more than a pho­to­blog. Pod­casts are large­ly orga­nized as blogs. Mailchimp and Sub­stack are blogs tied to email lists. And of course there’s Tum­blr, Word­Press, Medi­um, and oth­er more clas­sic text-based blogs. Nowa­days the con­cept is so diverse and dif­fuse that it’s become invis­i­ble. The impor­tant thing is that peo­ple have a voice that they can share.