Are blogs going to be the next 8-track tapes?

  • Sorry about the lack of blog­gi­ness. I’ve been kind of busy, but also just going through one of those times when I sort of won­der if I need to keep blog­ging. In the end, I decided that I should ( — obvi­ously — ), but it makes me remem­ber a recent arti­cle that indi­cated that Chris­t­ian blog­ging may be on the wane.

    The arti­cle was in Chris­tian­ity Today. The author looked at the data and judged that blogs may no longer have “mad craze” sta­tus. There are still 2 mil­lion peo­ple who start new blogs every month, but the num­ber of those who quit has been trend­ing up.

    Tech researcher Gart­ner Inc. reported ear­lier this year that 200 mil­lion peo­ple have given up blog­ging, more than twice as many as are active.

    “A lot of peo­ple have been in and out of this thing,” Gart­ner ana­lyst Daryl Plum­mer told reporters. “Every­one thinks they have some­thing to say, until they’re put on stage and asked to say it.” Given the aver­age lifes­pan of a blog­ger and the cur­rent growth rate of blogs, Gart­ner says blog­ging has prob­a­bly peaked.

    That sounds about right. When I think of it, most of the Ortho-blogs that were here when I started three years ago have gone. And most, I think, had darn good rea­sons for doing that. Either Real Life required more atten­tion or they ran out of things to say. Or, in the case of the younger and more hip among us, they emi­grated over to MySpace and Facebook.

    And I would do that, too, but Face­book seems like a dif­fer­ent sort of thing. Much less about per­ora­tions and blovi­at­ing ( — look ‘em up. They might be in your next cross­word puz­zle — ). Much more about “Hey. Whazz happ­nin? Okay. C U later. :-) ” Which is a rough adjust­ment to make when you’re as much of a lover of full-bodied, Victorian-carved sen­tences as I am.

    So I’m hang­ing in there for a while longer at least, though some­times I have to won­der why. But I’ll try to get the hang of the new stuff, too. Hope 2 C U-all later. :-)


    Related posts:

    1. Peo­ple power
    2. So you want to blog

    November 11th, 2007 | Grace | 7 Comments |

7 Responses and Counting...

  • s-p 11.11.2007

    Yep. My blog has kinda fallen by the way­side lately too. I’ve never used it much for pon­tif­i­cat­ing on Ortho­doxy, but still, I spend more time com­ment­ing on other people’s blogs than on writ­ing my own.

  • DebD

    I have found that the one-topic blogs have the short­est shelf-life. That may just be me, because I much pre­fer a blog that has vari­ety rather than blog­ging only about Ortho­doxy (except Fr. Stephen’s blog, that is) or moth­er­ing or whatever.

    But, I really don’t see myself blog­ging 5 years from now. I wres­tle with keep­ing mine going as well.

  • Grace

    s-p:
    But I think the model you’ve got for your blog is a pretty good one. You post only when you want to, even if that’s once a month or less. And hey, why use a blog to reach oth­ers for Ortho­doxy when you’ve got radiowaves? Heck, *someone’s* got to be out there hold­ing down the Old Media fort!

  • Grace

    Deb:
    Makes a lot of sense. I think one of the things I really like about blog­ging is the chance to talk about what­ever you felt strongly about or felt you could give a bit of infor­ma­tion on.

    Will I still be blog­ging in five years? That’s an inter­est­ing ques­tion. I would’ve said no, but I’m not cer­tain. I’m kind of sur­prised I’ve gone on for three.

  • Cather­ine K.

    I tried sev­eral ways of keep­ing my blog going, but it just got to the point where I didn’t think that I had any­thing to say that oth­ers couldn’t (and do) say far bet­ter :)

    Grace and S-P, I love both of your blogs — and S-P it doesn’t mat­ter if you post more than 4 times a year, or month, or what­ever. The radio pro­gram is great, and the occa­sional blog posts just come from a dif­fer­ent direction.

  • Barbara-Marie Drezhl

    I think that most bogs fail because they are too nar­row in focus. I just launched two new blogsites. One focuses on Russ­ian art/culture/music/spirituality and the other presents (mainly) Russ­ian arti­cles in trans­la­tion and mod­ern Russ­ian pop/rock music (with­out com­men­tary). I guess that nei­ther one is a “blog” in the strictest sense of the word. I use the blog for­mat because it is eas­ier for me than a web­site (for the moment). I also have an exten­sive image library and an exten­sive col­lec­tion of trans­lated arti­cles, so that makes it “eas­ier” for me to pro­duce daily posts with min­i­mal labour. Why don’t you check them out at 01varvara.wordpress.com and 02varvara.wordpress.com? The first is called “Art and Faith”, and the sec­ond “Voices from Russia”.

    Vara

  • Anam Cara

    I LOVE blogs and have accu­mu­lated a num­ber of them that I read over the period of a week or two. Only a cou­ple do I check every day. But I never started one, and don’t com­ment very much because I can’t imag­ine that any­one would care what I have to say.….

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