Peering Blurrily...just peering blurrily

"Blogs wane as the young drift to sites like Twitter"
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/living/2014294485_bloggingdecline21.html?cmpid=2628

I saw this in the Seattle Times, which still writes using some semblance of paragraphs and complete sentences, though paragraphs that are telegraphic--or Twitteresque--compared to news writing of the past. In an earlier post I quoted from a Slate article I saw recently:

Quote of the day: " I find myself wishing we were tweeting instead of old-school writing." From http://www.slate.com/id/2281158/entry/2281717/. 

Here's some of what the "blogging decline" article had to say:

Former bloggers said they were too busy to write lengthy posts and were uninspired by a lack of readers. Others said they had no interest in creating a blog because social networking did a good enough job keeping them in touch with friends and family.

And...

Although Tumblr calls itself a blogging service, many of its users are unaware of the description and do not consider themselves bloggers — raising the possibility that the decline in blogging by the younger generation is merely a semantic issue.
Kim Hou, a high school senior in San Francisco, said she quit blogging months ago, but acknowledged that she continued to post fashion photos on Tumblr. "It's different from blogging because it's easier to use," she said. "With blogging you have to write, and this is just images. Some people write some phrases or some quotes, but that's it."

Here's what I do, but I also get the occasional hit from a Google search. I also inveigled my way onto the web site links list of a prominent educational blogger, "Confessions of a Community College Dean," (Suburban Dad was kind to link to me)--more from the "Blogs wane" article:

In any case, he said bloggers often use Facebook and Twitter to promote their blog posts to a wider audience. Rather than being competitors, he said, they are complementary.
"There is a lot of fragmentation," Schneider said. "But at this point, anyone who is taking blogging seriously — they're using several mediums to get a large amount of their traffic."

I read a lot (including books, which is no longer the norm), but a lot of what I read strikes the infosphere  like lightning bolts, here then quickly gone, or is like the news crawl at the bottom of the screen that appears on most TVs now, including on news programs. As the cartoon image would have it, sometimes there's smoke coming out of my ears.
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Labels: blogging, citizen journalism, culture, literacy, Net Gen, new media