Blogging Has Peaked
The internet is so popular these days! A big new survey shows that people of all ages are emailing, searching, shopping, banking, and browsing news and information online more than ever. What they aren't doing more is blogging.
In other words, the internet is becoming more and more populated by normal people and less and less by nerds! This may soothe or alarm you, depending on which category you fall into. Christ, 16% of internet users age 74 and over are on Facebook (or possibly Friendster). Every normal act of searching and communicating on the internet has become mainstream. Searching for health information is the third-most popular online activity for everyone, even 18 year-olds. The internet is no longer a cool place for nerds: it's a boring place for all of us, where we check our bank balance and secretly research what that rash might be, all while trying to avoid running into grandma on Myspace. Keeping your diary on LiveJournal now just seems like a waste of time.
Only half as many online teens work on their own blog as did in 2006, and Millennial generation adults ages 18-33 have also seen a modest decline-a development that may be related to the quickly-growing popularity of social network sites. At the same time, however, blogging's popularity increased among most older generations, and as a result the rate of blogging for all online adults rose slightly overall from 11% in late 2008 to 14% in 2010. Yet while the act formally known as blogging seems to have peaked, internet users are doing blog-like things in other online spaces as they post updates about their lives, musings about the world, jokes, and links on social networking sites and micro-blogging sites such as Twitter.
That's right: blogging is an old person thing now. Have you ever seen Jeff Jarvis? There's your prototypical blogger. This was inevitable. Full sentences are an awful waste of characters.
