Has social media killed the blog? Or is this just the fondest hopes of the dead tree media? Whatever is going on the percentage of younger folks blogging has plummeted.
Corey is a New Yorker who lived most of his life in upstate New York but has lived in Queens since 2008. He's only been birding since 2005 but has garnered a respectable life list by birding whenever he wasn't working as a union representative or spending time with his family. He lives in Forest Hills with Daisy and Desmond Shearwater. His bird photographs have appeared on the Today Show, in Birding, Living Bird Magazine, Bird Watcher's Digest, and many other fine publications. He is also the author of the American Birding Association Field Guide to the Birds of New York.
My family started blogging a few years ago, as a way of having weekly family letters to all of the extended family. Most have drifted away from their blogs to Facebook.
Many of my birding friends are on Facebook and I regularly get requests to join. I did have a Facebook account for a short time. I enjoyed it…too much. I cut it out of my life simply to leave myself free to do other things. But I did gain an understanding of its allure. It is the perfect domain for we narcissists who revel in superficial relationships online. I could stay in touch with long-lost friends without a lot of emotional investment.
I like Twitter for the easy of sharing pictures and blog posts with a wider audience. I have found some really nice birding blogs and photography blogs from retweets on Twitter.
I still enjoy perusing birding blogs and birding magazines. Birding blogs are like easy-to-read birding magazine articles, but often lack the depth or quality, but are still very enjoyable. Sometimes bird blog entries are just as good or better than articles in the leading birding magazines. For those on Facebook, more power to ya! But I say “Long live the birding blogs!”
I love blogs, and I don’t ever expect to give up blogging. However, people have a tremendous desire to create content in all kinds of ways, and it used to be that blogging was the ONLY channel for people to use. Now, people can focus on niches like photography, with Flickr, or by creating videos YouTube, or by posting rants on Facebook, or by posting short messages on Twitter. I’m not surprised to hear that fewer people are blogging, and I do think that social media channels are the cause. But I don’t think this is a bad thing. My guess is that there would be far fewer abandoned blogs if there were no option to create content for social media sites.
That said, in some ways this trend may help the really great blogs to rise to the top, because fewer and fewer people would go through the trouble of creating a custom theme, creating focused regular content, and consistently writing on a blog, which gives far more creative freedom to the writer…
I enjoy blooging to communicate my birding escapades to my friends on a weekly basis but it is time consuming to organise the photos, get them resized for speedy uploads and come up with some (hopefully) interesting text. This in between family responsibilities, work and keeping fit.
I am actually surprised at the amount of people reading my blog though…facebook doesn’t have the same effect I think!
@Robert (Birding is Fun!): I agree with your opinion of birding blogs, though I like to think that we “are just as good or better than articles in the leading birding magazines” more often than sometimes.
@Will Marlow: If I may use your comment as a jumping off point…if everyone is using social media to share things they will be looking for something to share so the blogs that are left are well-positioned to get more eyeballs by simply existing.
@Gareth Hazell: I agree that blogs are far more effective at getting more information out to many people, especially ones outside of your social network.
I think the situation will be similar to birding the high arctic- We won’t see as many blogs but the few that we do see will be high quality.