— Musings —02.21.2011 07:57 AM
The blog is dead
Long live Twitter and Facebook, the King and Queen!
The Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center found that from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half; now 14 percent of children those ages who use the Internet have blogs. Among 18-to-33-year-olds, the project said in a report last year, blogging dropped two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier.
Former bloggers said they were too busy to write lengthy posts and were uninspired by a lack of readers. Others said they had no interest in creating a blog because social networking did a good enough job keeping them in touch with friends and family.
Blogging started its rapid ascension about 10 years ago as services like Blogger and LiveJournal became popular. So many people began blogging – to share dieting stories, rant about politics and celebrate their love of cats – that Merriam-Webster declared “blog” the word of the year in 2004.”
In the quest for brevity and given our attention span of gnats, I predict FB has a shelf life of 3-5 yrs..too heavy…this old geezer of 47 already knows that a catchy and/or substantive link will pull you anywhere quicker than a blog or FB post.
Twitter is the place to be….for now.
At least this blog doesn’t show signs of croaking.
I was recently at client’s offices. The central area is a cubical ghetto. I couldn’t help but notice a lot of these hard workers were Twittering away. I have to wonder how many companies are having valuable time wasted like this?
I think the concept of blogging is changing and will change in the future. In the past five years, I have noticed more aggregators and aggregators within others. People can include videos and other media text within their blogs. Newspaper sites such as the Globe and Mail allow people to leave printed comments, and rate other comments. Someday, people may be able to leave video comments. I believe Maclean’s lets people include YouTube video comments although this is not extensively used.
Young teens are not as interested in blogging as they can express their thoughts through other ways such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter through their iPhones. Heck, I’m still trying to figure out this new technology thing called “8-track.”
I am not blogging as much as I used to. However, I am still leaving comments on other blog posts. I do feel that I am contributing to the community and global discussion in one small way.
Without elaborating, let me just say that it’s as if Warren was reading my mind.
I still think having a website is useful. Profiling “enriched content” – like regular newspaper op-eds, for those who have them – is useful. But the idea of waking up in the morning two/three times a week to collect links and drop in photos to say in 500 words what I could say in 15 is killin’ me.