With the increasing acceptance of twitter and facebook as a preferred method of sharing information, a lot of bloggers I enjoyed reading are slowly moving away from blogging. As the count in my google reader decreases day by day, the number of tweets and facebook updates have been consistently increasing. In all honesty I dont blame the bloggers from moving on…
Twitter and Facebook have steadily become attractive replacements for blogging. Twitter’s 140 character “in the moment” microblogging allows immediate feedback, people respond almost immediately to a funny quote while back during blogging’s prime you would have to wait until ppl checked their RSS aggregator or did their ritualistic daily visit to your blog. Facebook provides an easier and seemingly more attractive alternative, dont know what to say but still want to appreciate the author… hit the “like” button and you are done.
Facebook and Twitter’s allure is also biased for the reason that they have slowly become the one stop spot for everything. With people sharing in the same sites there is hardly a need to remember blog URLs or keep in track of multiple sites… A long time back this very feature made livejournal my choice of blogging platform but now things have changed and my livejournal friend circle is only a shadow of what it was in its prime.
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On the bright side, there is a part of me thats thankful for this change. Facebook has given me a lot of readers who otherwise would never have found my blog. One look at my notes on my facebook page and you will notice that there have been regular comments and ‘likes’ on my posts, the very same posts have attracted comparatively less comments on the blog itself!
One of the truly bothering signs of the overall trend has been that people are slowly getting turned away from long posts. If you are reading this line there is a probability that you are a part of the minority that feel 141 characters is one character too much. Another alarming trend has been that writers are slowly getting tuned to the conciseness of tweets… who can blame them, with a whole generation of mobile devices coming along its much easier to read/respond to a tweet than a blog post.
One of the strengths of blogging has been the lifespan of a blog post. Most tweets become irrelevant after a few minutes but a blog post’s relevance continues depending on the topic and the writer in question. Its this attribute of the blog that can help it survive this takeover from other platforms.
When blogging fever had hit its prime years ago, there was a sudden advent of blogs appearing everywhere; now with the drive changing direction this might actually be for the best. The surviver in this exodus will most probably be the genuine high quality writers and their insistence in holding on to blogging will hopefully bring back the blog to its niche best.
Personally I have always spoken better thru my blog than thru my tweets or my status messages, so I do hope the hay days of blogging arent behind us.