This past year Wired magazine declared that the Internet was dead.  And usually at the end of the year someone declares blogging dead.  To be honest I have not see the posts yet, but have seen the chatter on Twitter.  For much the same reason the Internet was declared dead, blogging is being declared dead due to the rise of Twitter and Tumblr.  

Blogs are dynamic websites that use powerful content engines that allow a writer to publish and tag content for readers.  You can argue that any publishing website (NY Times, CNN) are blogs -- just more advanced, with multiple bloggers (aka reporters and editors). What sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr have done is raise the profile of blogs even more as people tweet and link to blog posts to raise their profile.  Just think of the impact a person with 100,000 followers can have if they tweet a link to your recent blog post?  What these micro blogging/social networking sites are doing is improving the Web  experience and helping bloggers build their audience without having to solely rely on Search and being linked from other sites.