Fewer people keeping blogs, more people using social media
It used to be that word of mouth was the only way to communicate news. Then came smoke signals, then print media, then radio and television. And with the Internet came a new medium: Blogging. But now it appears that too may be the medium of the past. That is because social media like Twitter and Facebook are providing a much easier, quicker way to spread news. From ABC News:
According to the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, blogging activity has dropped drastically among young adults in the United States, a demographic that traditionally helps define the tenor of the online conversation. In December 2007, for instance, 28 percent of all 18-to-29-year-olds with an Internet connection kept some sort of blog. By the same time last year, that number hovered around 15 percent. Meanwhile, the number of teens who say they blog regularly continues to shrink, as the Web’s youngest users ditch the blogosphere for the frantic pace of the social-media world. “Sites like Twitter are offering this other way to maintain a similar social connection, but without the concerted effort of a detailed, four-paragraph blog post,” says Amanda Lenhart, a senior research analyst at the Pew Research Center.
While I hate to see a decline in blogging (for obvious reasons), it’s hard to say that it’s at all shocking. But I also don’t believe blogging will disappear anytime soon. Like television and radio, it’s just a matter of how it will be incorporated into the world of social media. And we already see that every day. In fact, Twitter and Facebook owe much of their news-breaking ability to blogs, as both rely heavily on hyperlinks to external websites to disseminate information.
Source: palmettoscoop.com