With the passing of Michael Jackson I became painfully aware that the whole blog thing was dead:
Number of people who mentioned the King of Pop’s passing from my 52 followers: 50
Number of mentions of the one gloved icon’s demise from my blogroll: 2
The numbers are telling. The party is over.
Within an our of MJ’s death TMZ was reporting (via their blog) that the internet was “maxed out” with Tweets and Facebook updates. I guess TMZ had nothing else to report at that moment.
I’m not saying that blogs will end as of today, but it’s pretty obvious the whole online meme of confessing your soul out to the universe has moved on to faster pastures. The personal blog is on the downturn. Which, to me, is a bit sad. Not that I’m bashing Twitter or Facebook, but I do see these mediums as being limited and distracting when getting your full feelings and thoughts out.
Much like a car horn: Twitter is great to get your attention. Annoying when the hand stays on the button.
You have to remember I’ve lived through Geocities and Webrings. I’ve seen this stuff come and go in waves.
Me? When it comes to blogging I’m going to be like that last guy at the party, scraping out the room temperature bean dip with shards of crackers.
11 thoughts on “The Death of Blogging”
I woke up this morning with an addendum to this. I just realised I look forward to reading the new blog posts my favourite reads have done.
I have never looked forward to logging on to Twitter or even FB really.
So there you have it. For me at least, blogs are something to enjoy in anticipation, whereas the other media are more about immediate gratification or disappointment.
We don’t have to leave until they start serving coffee.
As long as you blog it… I’ll keep reading it…
Ha … my blog will be here until the end, too. There’s no quitting; I’ve tried. I don’t tweet much …. Twitter just seems so empty and pointless.
I know it makes me sad too. Mainly because it also sort of means the death of good writing.
I guess I’m trying to say that personal blogging is in it’s last throes, replaced by the more immediate thrill of Twitter.
From Mathew Ingram’s Twitter (Ironically): “Today news is broken on Twitter, guaranteed. Then it goes to the Web site, then the newspaper” He retweeted that from somebody but I’m too lazy to say who.
I’ll be right there with you.
While agree that blogging is on the decline, I don’t know if this is an accurate measure of that. Like Dyl said, blogs are slower-paced, more careful and permanent. They’re not usually about breaking news and getting thoughts out moments later. Twitter went down because it DOES fulfill that role.
Although maybe that immediacy was part of blogs before, and they’ll have to evolve to avoid the niches taken over by Facebook, and especially, Twitter. There’s no longer a point in posting throw-away relevant-now one-line blog posts when it’s much easier to just Twitter them.
In any case, I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing because it’s what I do.
Mutant: Get your own!!
Dyl: Good point. Blogs do have staying (searchable) power and Facebook has eroded my email use a bit. But as I sit here at work I find I’m turning to Twitter slightly more than refreshing my blog RSS feeds.
I guess I’m worried that Twitter is going to become the norm. Which, much like the VHS vs Betamax fight where the poorer quality medium won out, in my opinion, it would be a disaster.
Not sure I agree with your assessment on this one. Blogs have never been about breaking news, but more an opportunity to ruminate over topical subjects, be they topical to the world at large or just on a personal level.
You can hardly have an intelligent conversation on Twitter. It’s hard enough using the limited characters just to tweet nonsense sometimes.
Facebook is possibly more of a threat to blogging as you can give opinions a greater breadth of discussion. But in reality people use it to share silly photos, organise parties and UAE pointless apps.
I would say facebook has defo been the death of email though…?
I am so with you on that one…
…Pass the dip would you?