• Bloggers come and bloggers go

    It seems to me that the blogging world is changing at the moment. It seems as though there has been a slow down in the number of people starting new blogs and those who are keeping them may be keeping them slightly less often.

    Twitter and Facebook updates (which are a form of micro-blogging) have superseded the one-line, one-thought blog post of yore and now people seem more likely to crank up their blog when they’ve got something significant to say rather than making posts morning, noon and night.

    I think we are seeing some folk give up the habit too. That’s not really surprising. Bloggers come and bloggers go. The ones most likely to last seem often to be those who were early adopters – those who came to the blogging banquet early and have been sharing their wares for the longest time.

    A lot of commenting has gone on to Facebook and twitter too. I’m so lucky to have people congregating around this blog who sometimes want to have a conversation. That’s often what keeps me going. I know that a blog works best when it stimulates a community though that does not stop it being a performance event.

    I regret the move towards commenting on Facebook in some ways – often I post something here and post a link to in on Facebook to drive people to read it and then the conversation happens over there in semi-private rather than over here in public. I kind of understand why that happens but it is a sadness sometimes that people are not prepared to stand up and say good things out loud.

    Trends I expect in blogging in the future –

    • more blogs moving to longer blog posts
    • more blogs moving to slightly less frequency
    • better ways of linking the community element of blogging to Facebook and Twitter
    • those who do make the effort to blog through this time will become even more influential in their sphere
    • increasing attention being paid to quality of writing

    I can’t quite make my mind up where we are going with video. I don’t think the videoblogging phenomena has much energy in it but suspect that being able to make and post video easily is increasingly a part of the story.

    What do you think?

4 responses to “Bad day for bloggers”

  1. Pam Avatar
    Pam

    Your Google Reader RIP blog post gave readers (washed and unwashed) plenty of warning time to switch to another means of reading your blog. And now another goodbye to Google Reader! Thank goodness email still lives, as well as RSS feeds. It’s nice to have a choice.

  2. Jackie Heatlie Avatar
    Jackie Heatlie

    Bless you Kelvin – you have saved the day. I knew this ominous occurrence was coming and was completely flummoxed as to what to do about it. Thanks too for all the extra help in your blog.

  3. Kennedy Avatar
    Kennedy

    I have settled on Netvibes as my Google reader replacement (lack of clutter ec).

    The one thing I have not sorted is that in Google Reader I had a ifttt (www.ifttt.cm) recipe which transferred any post I starred to Evernote (www.evernote.com).

  4. John Avatar

    I’ve been using NetNewsWire all these years. They are keeping up with the changes, although I don’t think they’ve got the synchronization (amongst several different devices) working yet. There are several ways of doing this; but a reason everyone liked Google Reader so much was that it was the best tool for synchronizing (amongst different devices) even when you used a reader other than Google’s.

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