Here it is: My thousandth Good Reason post. And it only took five and a half years.
A lot about blogging has changed since I started the blog. Facebook got huge, and for a lot of people Facebook is their blog. I skipped Twitter, but got onto Google+, which may not be a Facebook killer (yet), but it is shaping up to be a Twitter killer. And there are podcasts, like my own ‘Talk the Talk‘.
What I’m finding is that these other forms of Internet expression are chipping around the edges of my blogging. I use FB or G+ for short ideas or links to articles about politics or religion that I don’t want to do a full blog post on. And ‘Talk the Talk’ is my outlet for linguistics items. So what’s Good Reason for?
What seems to be happening is that I’m using Good Reason less and less frequently, as a forum for pieces of writing which take longer to write, and require more thought. But I’m wondering if I want to post something short every day, like the most interesting link from my browsing that day.
But whatever happens, I’ll still be here posting stuff with some regularity. I don’t think anything else really does what the blog does for me, but its role might change a bit.
Do you find the same thing happening in your writing? Are other forms of media sapping your blog, or adding to it? Are we living in a post-blog era?
2 August 2011 at 9:57 am
I've pretty much abandoned my blog, except for about once a year when I go back and fiddle with its settings for fun and maybe post something. Facebook has definitely taken over the "sharing" role for me, and I suppose my situation has changed so much since I started the blog too. I've got other people closer to home to share with now!
3 August 2011 at 8:06 am
I have succumbed to Tumblr, but I have found it to be a really nice way to blog. You can write long or short entires and/or sumbit/reblog pictures, videos and links in a most aesthetically pleasing way. And the way that it works more widely distributes your posts (so they can be reblogged by others). But then it also depends who you want to reach.. Tumblr is frequented by 15-25 year olds, mostly.
4 August 2011 at 5:25 am
I mentioned some time ago my concerns that Twitter, especially, posed a threat to blogs and it seems I was right.
Twitter (and Facebook to some extent) is apparently fantastic for immediate "conversation" and "spreading the word" or "gathering the troops" but, like Facebook, it is all-but-useless as an archive of ideas or commentary. An awful lot of good work took place on Twitter during the Simon Singh saga but so much of it is now lost unless someone took it and blogged it.
I've watched several once-active blogs in my blogroll wither and die as their authors seem to have taken to Twitter and Facebook instead. It's a shame as social media sites are difficult to follow from the outside (I often see partial Facebook threads, if they're public, and I really can't follow Twitter streams at all) and some threads make almost no sense after just days or weeks, never mind years.
I fear that sceptical and atheist bloggers risk insularity if they don't maintain a clear public presence where their ideas are clearly spelt out in well-formatted, archival articles rather than in passing comments often expressed in a single short paragraph in a stream that will disappear from view in a matter of hours.