Why I Blog (And You Don't)
Published by Toronto Mike on December 16, 2010 @ 16:38 in Miscellaneous
I just glanced at Pew Internet's Generations 2010 report. It looks at online trends by different age groups, and it looks like blogging is on the decline.
Few of the activities covered in this report have decreased in popularity for any age group, with the notable exception of blogging. Only half as many online teens work on their own blog as did in 2006, and Millennial generation adults ages 18-33 have also seen a modest decline - a development that may be related to the quickly-growing popularity of social network sites. At the same time, however, blogging’s popularity increased among most older generations, and as a result the rate of blogging for all online adults rose slightly overall from 11% in late 2008 to 14% in 2010. Yet while the act formally known as blogging seems to have peaked, internet users are doing blog-like things in other online spaces as they post updates about their lives, musings about the world, jokes, and links on social networking sites and micro-blogging sites such as Twitter.
Without a doubt, blogging has fallen out of favour as people turn to Facebook and Twitter to share their thoughts and observations. In other words, people are still "blogging", they're just doing it on social networking sites instead of on their own personal blogs.
You're not blogging, but I am. Although you will find me on Facebook and Twitter, my core focus when publishing content is my blog. You see, I own this blog. It's my domain name, my traffic, I own the content and I configured the CMS and implemented the analytics tools.
The desire to write is inherent within, so the only debate is which platform to host my scribbling. Why give that control to Facebook or Twitter? I choose to blog because it gives me greater control and enables me to set my own ground rules.
Does anyone else out there still actually maintain a good old fashioned blog?
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Irvine
December 16, 2010 / 18:16
Blogging was always destined to be a failure for 1 reason. Content.
Common folk have always assumed that the barrier to starting their own newspaper, magazine or radio station was money. Starting a news weekly in the old days meant print presses, paper, delivery, etc. When blogging appeared people thought "hey, I can get in the game now, the playing field is level".
That didn't happen. The reason is most blogs contain nothing compelling that anyone wants to read. Or worse, they are an incestuous little circle jerk where the same 20 people partake in discussion.
And writing in FB or Twitter is far from blogging. It's often pointless insight or voyeurism into other people's personal lives. Nearly 50% of all Twitter traffic was considered "useless". Same can be said about Facebook. Radio stations are a great example. They update FB by saying "Joe is playing ALL THE HITS". No shit, really? Maybe Ford should post "Ford is selling cars". Thanks for pointing out the obvious.
What trend that is on the horizon is called "update exhaustion". Where folks get sick of the same repetitive posts and simply tune out.
As for blogging...blogging has become the standard for the old guard...aka journalists. They produce something called "content". Because in the end content is king...this is just a delivery system. nothing more.