Reading revolution?
The New York Times has reported that many young people who used to think blogs were to way to get their work noticed are now turning to social media sites instead, but other commentators have suggested there is little evidence to support the view that blogging overall is in decline.
According to The NYT, blogs are losing their shine for a lot of young people who prefer to express themselves via social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
The Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life project reportedly discovered that the number of bloggers aged between 12 and 17 fell by half from 2006 to 2009, while 18 to 33 year-old bloggers have dropped by 2 percentage points in 2010 compared to 2 years earlier.
Ex-bloggers apparently said they are too busy to write at length about their interests, while few readers did little to inspire them. Others reportedly claimed that social networking lets them keep in touch with friends and family more than a blog.
One problem with determining the rise and fall of blogging is what constitutes a blog. While some people think of it as an online diary where people publish regular entries, others define it by a personal and often opinionated writing style, which has led to some blogs growing into media institutions like The Huffington post.
The NYT article said Facebook and Twitter have changed the blogging game as internet users no longer need a dedicated blog to communicate with the world, not to mention that posting 140 character messages is a lot faster than writing a detailed blog entry.
Of course one of the advantages and pleasures of a blog is that it lets writers ramble and dig deep into the topics that interest them in ways that a Twitter blast or quickie Facebook update just will not satisfy and there is also more control over the content's layout and advertising.
Elisa Camahort Page, co-founder of BlogHer women's blog network reportedly believes blogs are still the place for ‘meatier discussions.'
"If you're looking for substantive conversation, you turn to blogs. You aren't going to find it on Facebook, and you aren't going to find it in 140 characters on Twitter," she told the newspaper.
The director of the Internet and American Life Project, Lee Rainie reportedly insisted that blogging is not dying out but changing as some features of blogs have been woven into new services.
"The act of telling your story and sharing part of your life with somebody is alive and well - even more so than at the dawn of blogging. It's just morphing onto other platforms," she reportedly said.
For instance, Tumblr calls itself a blog, but many of its users reportedly do not think of themselves as bloggers but use the service to post photos quickly taking the emphasis away from writing.
Of ‘traditional' blogging services, Google's Blogger has reportedly seen a small decline of 2 percent in US unique users to 58.6m, but across the world, the service's unique users have increased by 9 percent to 323m.
The chief exec of Automattic, which commercialises WordPress blogging software said WordPress attracts ‘serious bloggers' instead of novices who can quickly defect to social networks. Toni Schneider apparently stressed how instead of being enemies social networks and blogs are complimentary as networks can be used to promote blogs.
Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard takes a tougher stance in proclaiming blogging still alive and said data to back up claims of blogging dying in popularity is hard to find.
He said: "Blogging, of course, is changing; in the digital world, all is flux. But if you're going to declare, as today's New York Times headline does, that blogging is "waning," it would be good to be able to show a decline in numbers."
He accused the paper of ‘cherry-picking' statistics and said the full Pew Research Center research shows that overall blogging is growing in popularity, especially among older generations. He added that according to the report, the rate of blogging for all adults rose from 11 percent in 2008 to 14 percent in 2010.
"Fourteen percent of online adults are making some effort to write regularly in public! That remains a phenomenal fact; if you'd predicted it a decade ago, as only a handful of visionaries did, you'd have been dismissed as a nut (or maybe a cyber-utopian)," he said.
He reckons social networks have actually clarified the place of blogs, which are more in-depth than casual updates.
"Keeping a blog is more work than posting to Facebook and Twitter. So I wouldn't be surprised if, long-term, the percentage of the population blogging plateaus or even declines," he wrote.
