Under the title "Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter," the New York Times recently revisited a Pew Research Center study that I mentioned over a year ago.
They try to shed some new light on the issue but come up with the same conclusion that the Pew study did back then: that the younger generation is gravitating more towards Facebook and Twitter than they are blogs.
There are a couple interesting quotes from the piece that I wanted to mention. Like this one...
Indeed, small talk shifted in large part to social networking, said Elisa Camahort Page, co-founder of BlogHer, a women’s blog network. Still, blogs remain a home of more meaty discussions, she said.You know, I'm not sure how a comparison can be made between a blog post reviewing a nice restaurant with images and paragraphs of narrative and the, "I'm at [insert hot restaurant] and the noodles are awesome!!!" tweet, but for some reason people like to do it. Twitter and Facebook are not trade-offs for blogging and they never have been. If you're tweeting, you're not blogging and I'm not sure how anyone can say they're substituting one for the other.
“If you’re looking for substantive conversation, you turn to blogs,” Ms. Camahort Page said. “You aren’t going to find it on Facebook, and you aren’t going to find it in 140 characters on Twitter.”
Along the same lines, leave it to a grizzled old military veteran to break things down.
Russ Steele, 72, a retired Air Force officer and aerospace worker from Nevada City, Calif., says he spends up to three hours a day seeking interesting topics and writing about them for his blog, NC Media Watch, which covers local issues in Nevada County, northeast of Sacramento. All he wants is to have a voice in the community for his conservative views.
Although he signed up for Facebook this month, Mr. Steele said he did not foresee using it much and said that he remained committed to blogging. “I’d rather spend my time writing up a blog analysis than a whole bunch of short paragraphs and then send them to people,” he said. “I don’t need to tell people I’m going to the grocery store.”
-Image via Adventures In Dullness
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4 comments:
It's very simple. The people who had crappy blogs that nobody read are turning to Facebook and Twitter.
The rest of us are still out there.
love the photo of the blogger...
Or, Carlos ... people who never blogged to begin with.
People like us use Twitter, Facebook and blogging very effectively. Each is a separate animal. Discussed this at length on Wednesday when I spoke at the chamber of commerce panel. In fact, we even mentioned you!
Yes, FB and Twitter is an extension of our blogging for many of us.
But I remember when I first started blogging, there was a whole bunch of crappy blogs out there.
Back then, I used to read a lot of different blogs because it was phenomenal to me that people were actually reading blogs.
I had a little of that old-school journalism arrogance where I thought that if you weren't getting paid to write, then you are not worth reading.
My arrest changed that perspective instantly because the blogosphere covered the hell out of it while much of the media ignored it.
Bloggers all over the country were covering it, even calling Miami PD for quotes and the arrest report.
And locally, Stuck on the Palmetto and Critical Miami and a couple other blogs were reporting on it, and getting a lot of attention from their regular readers.
It was a defining moment for me which led me to launch my own blog.
But at the same time, I also noticed there were a lot of blogs that were not being read. A lot of blogs that were not really good, just people writing mundane thoughts with no focus or specialty.
Blogs with blurry photos and horrible writing that were more like diaries, except they left all the interesting stuff out.
These bloggers obviously had a need to publish their thoughts, even if nobody was reading them (or at least commenting on them).
FB and Twitter changed all that because it allowed these people to continue posting their mundane thoughts and blurry photos to a captive audience.
It's no wonder they allowed their blogs do die.
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