I just glanced at Pew Internet's Generations 2010 report. It looks at online trends by different age groups, and it looks like blogging is on the decline.
Few of the activities covered in this report have decreased in popularity for any age group, with the notable exception of blogging. Only half as many online teens work on their own blog as did in 2006, and Millennial generation adults ages 18-33 have also seen a modest decline - a development that may be related to the quickly-growing popularity of social network sites. At the same time, however, blogging’s popularity increased among most older generations, and as a result the rate of blogging for all online adults rose slightly overall from 11% in late 2008 to 14% in 2010. Yet while the act formally known as blogging seems to have peaked, internet users are doing blog-like things in other online spaces as they post updates about their lives, musings about the world, jokes, and links on social networking sites and micro-blogging sites such as Twitter.
Without a doubt, blogging has fallen out of favour as people turn to Facebook and Twitter to share their thoughts and observations. In other words, people are still "blogging", they're just doing it on social networking sites instead of on their own personal blogs.
You're not blogging, but I am. Although you will find me on Facebook and Twitter, my core focus when publishing content is my blog. You see, I own this blog. It's my domain name, my traffic, I own the content and I configured the CMS and implemented the analytics tools.
The desire to write is inherent within, so the only debate is which platform to host my scribbling. Why give that control to Facebook or Twitter? I choose to blog because it gives me greater control and enables me to set my own ground rules.
Does anyone else out there still actually maintain a good old fashioned blog?
