Tuesday, March 01, 2011

What I Had For Breakfast And Other Thoughts On the State of Blogs



I woke up from a nightmare which I immediately forgot. Then I fed the birds and squirrels in the backyard with some trail mix and dry bagels and sunflower seeds. Like stepping into that Hitchcock film, it was, with about ten rooks silently waiting. But I'm used to being haunted.

Breakfast consisted of a tiny eclair with artificial whipped cream in it. Usually I bravely masticate horse food (oats) because it does good to the gutters of a goddess but I had a long and tiring day yesterday and the fridge offered this poor little forgotten eclair as its only offering.

That is how the New York Times views blogs. It must, because of this article a few days ago:
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.
Defining a blog is difficult, but most people think it is a Web site on which people publish periodic entries in reverse chronological order and allow readers to leave comments.
Yet for many Internet users, blogging is defined more by a personal and opinionated writing style. A number of news and commentary sites started as blogs before growing into mini-media empires, like The Huffington Post or Silicon Alley Insider, that are virtually indistinguishable from more traditional news sources.

The article tells us that blogs are on the wane and that Twitter is the new fad. This means that you will no longer be told about the rooks but only about the breakfast because the rooks would take more than 140 letters.

I'd do well as a full-time tweeter/twitterer, because the one thing I have always been in writing, in all languages, is concise. I was born that way. Still, it's pretty tough to talk about something complicated in sound-bites.

Who knows if political blogs are on the wane or not? They are not the same as personal blogs and neither are they particularly focused on the younger age groups.

Still, maintaining a blog over time is hard work. It's especially hard if you don't get paid for it because life needs intervene. I noticed this when I started working on my blogroll. Many of the blogs I linked to no longer exist, and the blogroll right now (before I get to adding new blogs) is what has survived the last three years, with few later additions. And yes, I'm a dreadful housekeeper. I use my own bookmarks to read blogs and not the blogroll itself.