People love to publish. They publish photos, images and videos… it could be on Facebook or it could be on their blog.
Twitter allows you to write very short stories (140 characters) and MySpace is for publishing music and music videos. LinkedIn is for publishing information about yourself and to encourge networking. The Web has become the largest publishing and photocopying machine the world has ever seen.
To put togther an article or a book 20 years ago was arduous and very few people got to see it as the web was not on public display but buried in University research labs and offices and the software tools did not exist to easily and quickly create anything much more than a text document.
When blogs emerged in the 1990’s they were very much text based but have evolved into multimedia platforms where can embed your YouTube Videos as well Slideshare and paste in your Flickr images to embelish your text and story.
Facebook the social media giant has since arrived on the scene and developed into a multi-media rich social networking portal where you can invite all your friends and share your story with minimal friction. To publish and share in 2010 is ‘dead easy’ and that is what most people want, they just want to be given a tool that doesn’t require plugins or widgets and just ‘do it’.
Creating, maintaining and developing a blog takes a lot of research, time and effort with determining what plugins to use, what widgets to embed or what email and RSS subscription platforms to use rather than just signing into Facebook.
Nielsen research is showing that traffic to to WordPress and Blogger the two major blogging sites is stagnating, while Facebook’s traffic grew by 66% last year and Twitters by 47%. Morningside Analytics, an analytics market research firm has discovered a ‘vast field of dead blogs’ in Indonesia that have not been updated since May 2009 which directly corresponds with the arrival of the Indonesian version of Facebook.
So is Facebook killing the blogs? The truth is that most people do not want to take the time and effort and pour their soul into a blog unless they are passionate about their subject. What we are seeing is the evolution of blogging into channels and platforms for interests such as personal branding or for niche specialist publishing.
Some examples of the power blogs in the niche publishing areana are blogs on fashion such as the Satorialist, politics ( Huffington Post), technology with Engadget and social media (Mashable).
These digital power blogs are transcending countries and oceans and transforming and threatening publishing and the arrival of Apple’s iPad is also changing the way we will publish. Those who start a blog and give up doesn’t mean blogging is dying it just means that it is evolving.
So do you think Facebook is killing blogs?