- Maybe blogging will get lonely
Blogging and long-form web writing will be around for a long time. Even if readership drops and people start spending more and more of their time on Twitter and Facebook, for the authors Blogging will still be relevant to them. I want to extend an idea written by Mark Evans in which he talks about the decline in attention blogs are getting
Mark Evans wrote a post called Blogs: The Honeymoon is Over, in it he says:
A growing number of people, who used to spend a lot of time reading blogs, are spending time with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and, of course, their e-mail. The reality is people are becoming digitally stretched, and blogs are getting less love these days.
That is all true. Blogs are no longer as exciting as they once were, people care a lot less about Technorati rankings and don’t find it relevant any more. I want to extend Mark’s idea and say that as the most popular thing online or not, there will always be enough of a population that cares about blogging that people will keep it relevant. Here’s the comment I left to his post:
I think you’re proving a point right now about why blogs will still be around in the long term. Even if people go from reading 700 blogs a day down to 0 and focus all their time on twitter and Facebook, for the blog author there is still no better way to explore an idea if only for his or her own personal self education.
When things change at the pace the web enables, people interesting in those topics can’t learn new concepts so much from short-form content like Twitter. Blogs are the place to explore new ideas and to discuss possibilities, to respond to one another and to bring in rich media into the discussion.
The more I describe this boring but important future for blogging, the more it seems to me like blogging will become the academia of the web.
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Open Mode 
Malcolm, tight new theme you have here!What happened to Intense Debate? I guess it was Disqus inclusion of video to record responses?Anyway, despite the emergence of new technologies in communication and all its permutations, blogs will be the foundation (or platform) for all of them. We saw the tapering of RSS when Twitter was introduced.Video blogs are taking more of a prominent role, but a lot of people are too shy or not good enough communicators to express their ideas through their webcams.What's next… in my opiniong? Hologram technology (which will be totally sick!), but they'll still be linked to “long form” writing – blogs. :)It'll be interesting to see how everything unravels of how we communicate through technology over the next few years.
Thanks, I like this theme as well… I had to mod it quickly at first to change it to a 2 column theme from a 3 column one.I'll be posting some stuff on ID versus DISQUS later. There are somethings I want to talk about with each.It's funny you mention video blogs as well…. Keep on eye out for that.
Sounds great ! ” Blogging will become the academia of the web.”…………………………………………… : )
I think the idea that you explore in this brief post is solid .. and thank goodness for the migration of quite a bit of the twaddle to Twitter and Facebook, and others networking and expressive formats. Many of the people who are exploring issues relatively seriously, or even just thinking with decent rigour, already know each other and interact on the other newer media (of course as the years go on others will find others) but yes, blogs (content, rhythms of reading, commenting and linking) are supportive of individual learning and serve as an expository and reflective form of interpreting and distributing information ina certain context .. much like what academics do in formal papers that they circulate to relatively small circles of colleagues and students for review and commentary. Blogs are less formal and more accessible and open, generally.