The slow decline of blogs? (again)
This is a theme that comes around time and time again. For example, last October, Paul Boutin wrote an article on Wired entitled “Twitter, Flickr, Facebook make blogs look so 2004.”
The numbers don’t show a decline
Charles Arthur quotes the Technorati stat from last year that shows that 95% of the 133 million blogs are basically dead – abandoned due to lack of interest or time. But that’s still seven million+ that are alive and well.
And on his data mining blog, MSN’s Matthew Hurst produced a series of graphs to prove that blogs aren’t declining. He took a series of common (not news led) terms like car repair and birthday, things that you’d imagine to be fairly consistent year round.
Looking at Blogpulse (which Matthew co-created), he found 142 posts about car repair on 4 Jan and 144 on 21 June. Similarly, he took the term ‘birthday’ and found the trend to be fairly straight.
Does Twitter actually give blogs a new lease of life?
I’d also take the opposite view to Charles Arthur: Rather than spelling the kiss of
death, Twitter and Facebook give a lot of blogs a new lease of life.
From personal experience and from looking through this blog’s stats at Get Clicky,
I know I get around 5% of my monthly unique visitors from Twitter.
While that doesn’t sound like a lot, that’s 120 odd readers I’d normally not
have and I know that for other blogs the % figure
is much higher.
That’s because in a lot of cases, Twitter is not a self contained place to have conversations (the stereotype being it’s where people blast off 140 character thoughts about what they had for breakfast), it’s somewhere where conversations kick off that get taken elsewhere.
So I predict that in a year’s time we’ll still be having ‘decline of blogs’ type pieces…and plenty of posts like this in return.
Image – Matthew Hurst / Blog Pulse
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Thanks Martin, I completely agree – it's often a question of semantics and 'what is a blog' and new services are indeed pushing the boundaries of blogging.
It's pretty obvious that the amount of user generated online content is only increasing. What is a blog then? It's a collection of media, user-created or user-selected that has some sort of commentary and some sort of subscription feature.
The photos I put up on Flickr are a blog, the videos I post to Youtube are a blog but so are the songs I "reblip" on Blip.fm. So too are the comments I leave on a service like Disqus or Friendfeed is a blog.
It seems like a lot of the "traditional" word-driven blogging platforms have stalled over the last few years. Blogger in particular seems frozen in time but Technorati never seems to index the stuff I want them to.
New services are picking up the slack. Twitter is providing new readership but so is Facebook. Many people had connected their FB Notes to a blog RSS, making Facebook something of an RSS reader. If Facebook does move towards public postings by default it will become a major blog publisher overnight. Even in its semi-private state right now, what's the difference between a Facebook Note readable by 500 friends and a Blogspot note that maybe twenty people will read? Answer: the Guardian doesn't see the ping.