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"Blogs are meant for people for whom being a writer, being a creator, is a passion, or perhaps a requirement of life." - Dylan Wilbanks, a Web producer in Seattle.
That pretty much sums up why I blog. Writing is a requirement of life, and I'll write about anything.
I have Twitter and Facebook accounts, too, in addition to my blog. I admit I don't use Twitter much because I don't have a cell phone to text to it and posting via computer sort of defeats the purpose of a Twitter feed. It's not spontaneous in the way Twitter ought to be.
My Facebook is more for keeping touch with those who don't blog but do have a FaceBook account - and everyone on my FaceBook is someone I know in person. If I don't know you face-to-face, I'm not likely to add you to my FaceBook network. And almost everything I post on FaceBook, I blog in greater detail at one of my blogs (Sadly, I am one who has multiple blogs because I am so irredeemably wordy.)
This is apparently not like Dylan Wilbanks, who uses Twitter and FaceBook more than blogging. Those sites, he says, allow him to trade "small thoughts with my community, and right now all I can manage is small thoughts."
Many folks say the reason younger people prefer Twitter and FaceBook is because they get instant feedback and can trade "small thoughts" - and with FourSquare, can also give location information to meet up with friends.
In some ways, it disturbs me that younger people don't blog, precisely because blogging is a forum to develop thought more deeply (not that I use it as such - my thoughts here are shallow and mostly reactive - and wordy, wordy, wordy). Perhaps it relates to what Michael Banks has to say:
Michael Banks, the author of "Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World's Top Bloggers," says that many bloggers have simply realized that the energy and dedication to maintain a blog far exceeded their expectations. Good blogging he says, is intensive. "You can't just blurt anything out. You have to think it through."
I'm not a good blogger. I don't think blogging is intensive, and I most certainly do blurt out just anything. My blog archives will quickly reveal just how blurty I am. I don't spend a lot of time researching my blog posts, and I'm not a heavy linker. I know linking is supposed to be one of the main attractions of blogging, but my blog more closely resembles my paper journals, where I do jot down things I want to think about in greater detail later and links are just bookmarks, sources I can refer back to, not a link salad for other people to enjoy. My blogging is really quite selfish. I'm not blogging for anyone who might be reading me; I'm blogging for me. If a reader gets something from it, good. And if not, well, they don't have to read my blog.
"From what I've seen online," Mr. Chung says, "few bloggers with personal blogs tend to remain interested in blogging after two to three years. This was true before Facebook, and is especially true now. Our priorities and time commitments change." - Anthony Chung, a dentist in Toronto.
If that's true, then I've blown the odds away - I've been blogging online for over a decade now (since 1996) and I'm not slowing down. Blogging doesn't take me a lot of time. I don't agonize over what I'm going to say or what any readers might think about it. Sorry, Dear Readers, but my blog isn't about you, it's about the things I go "ooohhh - shiny!" over. If you go shiny over the same things, cool. If not, eh, No big deal, right?
New-media prognosticators say Chung's digital path - from personal blog to an array of platforms, each designated for a specific purpose - is likely to be a common one in coming years.
Well, common in the coming years? Aren't they a bit behind the times? It's been common for a while. Maybe they meant it would become standard practice, rather than common?
I'm in full agreement with Jay Rosen. "But the combination of a Twitter feed for constant contact and a blog for persistent writing over time is too effective for it to wholly disappear." - Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University He left out FaceBook, FourSquare, flickr, and YouTube. Still, I think a combination of communication portals is important - Twitter for immediate updates and feedback, FaceBook for updating a wide community of people about personal data, FourSquare for locating friends or being located, flickr for photo sharing, YouTube for what was once the province of home movies, and the blog for lengthier discourses, short stories, and essays.
Each medium has a purpose. Linking them together can let people get a clearer idea about one another, but mine aren't linked together very well. If I didn't use Itzl's picture for near everything, I don't think anyone who happened to be on 2 or more of the platforms I use would link them to me because I've been very bad about connecting the dots for others. After all, didn't I say I was doing this more for me than for others?
I guess just to have it in one place, I ought to post all my on line presences, and I may do that once I'm back at my desktop and have all the links available because relying on my memory to provide correct links may not be the best thing to do. As the user of those tools, my links to update them are different han the links used to read them.