Last night’s inaugural meeting of Manchester’s Social Media Cafe (#smc_mcr) suggested that the “death of the blog” has been greatly exaggerated.

And not only is blogging very much alive, it has graduated from the perceived image and PCs of young men whose bedrooms are adorned with model aircraft.

Craig McGinty, journalist, blogger on This French Life and panellist on the #smc_mcr’s first debate, described a blog as an online “base camp”: “It’s important that you have your own entity on the Internet,” he said. “You’ve got the opportunity to get an audience without going through the gatekeepers of newspaper editors and all it takes is time.” At a more fundamental level, McGinty feels that blogging is just the latest emodiment of a basic human need to communicate, which began with cave paintings. “The only difference is the tools,” he added.

Fellow panellist, Chi-chi Ekweozor, MD of real fresh tv, cited renowned blogger, Robert Scoble’s use of blogging and social media to “meet one new person every day”. Clearly, a bigger task than is possible in the offline world, unless you have hours to kill and walk quickly.

But what about corporate blogging? Is there room for social media activity with professional funding and - potentially - an underlying agenda to sell? Chi-chi Ekweozor has been monitoring the FTSE100 for such activity, and while there are good examples of blogs at work  the UK’s major companies still lag behind the USA, where CEOs have readily taken up the blogging mantle.

But she sees a future for corporate blogging, “for communicating with staff and establishing credibility” with the wider world.

So, it’s agreed: both boardrooms and bedrooms will continue to hum with the creation of blogs and interaction with social media tools such as Twitter, but still leaving time to finish assembling that scale model of Concorde. 

P.S. Keep watching PR Media Blog for exclusive interviews from the Social Media Cafe event.

Figures from Nielsen Online reported on Mashable show Twitter to be taking off like nobody’s business, with users growing 422% on last year and sticking around on the site for 7 minutes on average (a veritable lifetime online).

Still, Jeremiah Owyang refers to this (unsurprisingly via Twitter itself) that in the context of social media networks, Twitter’s 2.3m users is small beer when compared to the hulking 100m registered Facebook users.

So, as a Twitterer myself, I now know what it feels like to be in an official minority and a growing one at that. Makes you want to pick up a placard and demand your rights!

 STOP PRESS: Robert Scoble (again, on Twitter) says he’s seen Twitter “all over CNN”.