I’ve been thinking recently about blogging.<\/p>\n
Not my blogging, but blogging in general<\/i>.<\/p>\n
I’ve noticed, from completely unscientific personal observations, that blogging is on the decline. Eight years ago, when I started up this website, it seemed like the rage. A journal… online!<\/b> There was no reason I couldn’t have done that before; software (namely Greymatter) automated the process.<\/p>\n
I’m not alone in my feeling that blogging has changed in the past year or two. The Economist<\/a><\/i> mused on the decline of blogs last week, and their article confirmed some of what I’m thinking — but they didn’t quite explain why<\/i>.<\/p>\n I should qualify what I’ve said, though. It’s not blogs in general<\/i> that are in decline, because there’s always a need for niche and focused commentary on topics like politics, religion, writing, that sort of thing; it’s the personal<\/i> blog that is disappearing. I’ve noticed that friends who would blog extensively about their lives have all but given it up.<\/p>\n The reason I think the personal blog is vanishing? Microblogging.<\/p>\n The person who would write on a blog about the ham sandwich they had for lunch — and have that post seen by maybe a dozen people — can instead post a Facebook status update or a push a tweet on Twitter, and have it read by perhaps hundreds or thousands of people. The investment of time in writing and reading is far<\/i> less; yes, the message is more superficial, but it’s also quicker. And the advantage that a microblogging has over running a WordPress blog or using another hosted service is that the person doesn’t have to manage software<\/i>; that headache is taken care of by someone else somewhere else. Hacks, comment spam, all that rot, is no longer a headache.<\/p>\n Microblogging isn’t a bad thing, and services like Twitter and Facebook have their definite advantages, like Facebook’s photo management. I do think it loses depth<\/i>, however; blogs are searchable, status updates are not. (Or if they are, I’ve never found a way. But I know I barely scratch the surface of what Facebook is capable of.)<\/p>\n And going to back to my completely unscientific perception about the decline of personal blogs, some of the personal blogs that I’ve liked to read have become archives of Tweets. I do this myself<\/a>, though I’m still puzzling out the utility of doing this; I have the Twitter archives posts suppressed so that they don’t ordinarily show up to the reader, which begs the question of why they even exist.<\/p>\n I tend to think that the personal blog may become a rarer thing, and trends are certainly pointing in that direction. It can<\/i> be a difficult to write; I’ve gone through periods where I made<\/i> myself write something, I’ve gone through periods where I’ve allowed myself the freedom not<\/i> to write something. The great mystery of the personal blog is that it is<\/i> personal, and an audience can be difficult to build — and even more<\/i> difficult to sustain. But there is<\/i> something unique about a personal blog — the heft and weight of time and words — that microblogging services lack and may never find.<\/p>\n There was, honestly, a point to this three hundred words ago when I began rambling this morning, but I’ve since lost the plot. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve been thinking recently about blogging. Not my blogging, but blogging in general. I’ve noticed, from completely unscientific personal observations, that blogging is on the decline. Eight years ago, when I started up this website, it seemed like the rage. A journal… online! There was no reason I couldn’t have done that before; software (namelyContinue reading “On the State of Blogging”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[71,752,4102],"class_list":["post-5180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-blogging","tag-facebook","tag-writing","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5180\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}