Fling Media

Monday, May 19, 2008

The Decline of the Blog?

Today Greg Hoy Twitter’d:

“I am really noticing people are not posting to their blogs anymore. Like everywhere.”

I tend to agree. Its something I’ve been thinking about for the past year as Twitter and Twitter-like sites have increased in popularity. I’ve noticed as the activity in more presence-posting tools like Twitter increase that number of traditional regular blog posts tends to decrease. It seems that as people Twitter more, they blog less.

This completely makes sense, if you have something to say, you say it, and you aren’t likely to repeat it. Especially if you know the people you want to talk to are listening.

But what about everyone else? What about posterity? Do what we say via Twitter continue to have value beyond the immediate discussion?

Anyone remember mIRC?

In many ways Twitter reminds me of mIRC a popular service over ten years ago. It was a great communication channel, lots of great discussion, but only for a select few. And very temporary, meaning that the knowledge rarely transcends past the participants of the discussion. The discussion only made sense in context to the discussion.

Twitter is definitely more evolved than mIRC as it allows for many more to participate in the discussion as well as each user to filter what they choose to read. But the dialog seems to flow in a very similar manner, many voices talking at once about many topics, but through it conversations emerge.

The Blogging Revolution

One of the great things about the blogging revolution of the past five years was anyone could create a community of their own. That the number of ideas and discussion seem to explode, within each community until they overflowed and began to touch other communities.

But across all these independent states we had Google, which created bridges between our quest for new information with new sources. In other words all of our stories were heard by Google, and when ever we needed something all we have to do was ask dear old Uncle Google.

I used to see presence-posting as being one and the same as the concept of micro-blogging, a series of brief status updates, shorter form blogging. But seeing people highly object to the concept of cross-posting services like Tumblr with Twitter, and given that the vast majority of updates seem to be responses rather than original posts, it appears that sites like Twitter have become more about community dialog than individual publishing.

Which is all fine and good.

The Next Evolution of Blogging?

I find it incredibly interesting to see a service evolve around the usage of the user, which I believe Twitter has. And I believe it is more important to have a greater number of voices not fewer. But does it come at a cost in saying something new and original? Must we truncate our thoughts and ideas to 120 characters at a time in order to be heard?

And if we are able to create through short group communication, does it isolate the invention of something new and the dialog around it to a select few? Is the consensus of many captured or aggregated for future communities to ponder? (and by future I mean next year) Can we recall the information later? Can true outsiders, beyond our network of friends, contribute their ideas too, either now or later?

But most importantly does it have to? Does a tool need be all these things. Or does this type of communication have unique value as some sort of catharsis to our increasingly isolated lives? Or was blogging just one baby step to today’s more real time short form discussion?

Or have we finally run out of new things to say? Have we become content with our current knowledge that we no longer have anything new to contribute… in long form at least.

No Answers Here

I have no idea what the answers to these questions could be. Sure I have ideas, but it’s anyones guess how it will all work out. But I do find it highly fascinated to watch and learn from the phenomenon. To see how patterns evolve and see who will stand victorious, communities or publishing… or maybe it will be the next big thing.

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