Is personal blogging dying under the weight of real-time flows?

Remember the days when the modern internet was new and everyone and their dog had a blog they were writing several times a week, if not every day?

Around 2004 blogs suddenly became incredibly mainstream due to their involvement in several political events and some other shady things that happened. If you’re really interested in this bit of history there is a wonderful wikipedia page about the history of blogging.

Personally I was a little late to that revolution having made my first blog post (that still exists) on the 21st of April 2006. My god I felt like I was discovering a whole new world of possibilities! And I was, I really was, it was around that time that the Slovene blogging community started really taking shape and I was following oh so many blogs. Most incredibly bad, some very very good. We even had a conference for bloggers or two, think they were called Blogres.

But I’m getting off on a tangent here. Fast forward into the present time.

Lately what I’ve been noticing is that it’s getting harder and harder to blog even a few times a week. Just blinking my eyes and completing a TODO or two and whoosh, a whole week has passed and my personal blog doesn’t update.

What’s stranger still is that I’ve been noticing this in my RSS aggregator as well! I have a folder specifically for personal blogs, which I define as blogs written by people for the people with no particular reason. Mostly about their life or some especially interesting thing they want to say.

These blogs, and I only followed about ten back then, used to be a daily chore. Nowadays as few as 20 posts accumulate over the course of a week and I’m following around thirty blogs.

My hypothesis as to why this is happening is that people have switched to Twitter and Facebook for their personal expression needs. Because they are tweeting tens of messages every day, they simply run out of things to say on their blogs. It makes sense really, after you’ve told everyone every minute idea that pops into your head, what else is there to say on your blog?

What do you think, is real-time chatting killing the need for personal blogging?

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This entry was written by swizec, posted on May 25, 2010 at 10:56 am, filed under Real-Time web and tagged Blog, Facebook, Twitter, Web Rings and Cliques, Writing. Bookmark the permalink.
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