Like any aspiring filmmaker, Michael McDonald, a high school senior, used a blog to show off his videos. But discouraged by how few people bothered to visit, he instead started posting his clips on Facebook, where his friends were sure to see and comment on his editing skills.
“I don’t use my blog anymore,” said Mr. McDonald, who lives in San Francisco. “All the people I’m trying to reach are on Facebook.”
Blogs were once the outlet of choice for people who wanted to express themselves online. But with the rise of sites like Facebook and Twitter, they are losing their allure for many people ”” particularly the younger generation.
Maybe. But I think that the blogosphere is a good place for cliquey things. For example, I like to follow friends of mine who are doing missionary work in various places. I’m also really into trail ultra marathons like the Leadville 100 (that’s running 100 continuous miles through the mountains of CO), so I like to follow the blogs of people like Tony Krupicka, Geoff Roes, and Kilian Jornet since they give summaries of their training schedules and where they’ve run, the scenery, what the race was like, the community and folks they’re running with etc. All of this is not well recorded by facebook and certainly not by twitter. So maybe these things are more of a niche market.
I don’t understand Twitter. I really don’t. I created an account there out of boredom one day and post updates now and then but I really don’t get the point of it.
I asked my 20-something son and he doesn’t really get it, either. He says he finds it helpful to keep up with national/breaking news and such but not for much else.
Facebook? No way, no how. That place will never be secure and, in essence, its reason for existence is to target and deliver up consumers/potential customers. It’s not that I have anything going on that I’m trying to hide; I just don’t want to be watched and tracked. It feels creepy.
I agree with Optimus — it’s a niche thing. Blogs will always have their place and will attract people with an attention span who prefer depth.
Quite often Tweets just refer people to articles published online or to blog posts.
However, I suppose there are those who are taken with brief snippets of one side of a conversation who are content just to stay on Twitter, where their attention span does not get pushed; and of course there are journalists looking for unwise thoughts from bishops to break to the world.
All these media – blogs, tweets, personal pages do show how personalised publication has become.