← Quora archive  ·  2011 May 25, 2011 09:27 PM PDT

Question

Is Quora the future of blogging?

Answer

No, and the reason has nothing to do with technology or business strategy or trends or anything Quora can control. It has to do with the cognitive psychology of the medium. Blogging is not the message of this medium.

Quora Q&A has the questioner providing the frame, and even when you get creative with reframing, there is a limit to how much room you have available to shape your answer around your insights.

Quora posts look like they could replicate blogging, but since the audience relationship development is around the Q&A framework, it is very hard to create a different brand around your Quora posts.

But these are also the reasons Quora is a great complement to blogging. It allows you to be a guest in other people's minds and from that position draw them into yours. As content marketing, it is vastly more effective than blogging. For that reason alone, certain types of blogs will be ripe for substitution with a Quora presence. But those blogs are only a fraction of all blogs, and were never very good blogs (in the sense of being appropriate for the medium) to begin with.