PT Insights

Feb
22

The evolution of blogging

David Leavitt

Young people appear to be abandoning email.

People aged 12 to 17 use Web-based email about 24 percent less than they did in 2007, according to comScore. “Younger users have so many communication channels that e-mail isn’t their first option,” Andrew Lipsman of comScore told the New York Times. “At this stage in their life, many of them are communicating through Facebook and texting.”

What about blogging? Is the blog — Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year in 2004 — dying out among teenagers? Well, it depends on how you define the word "blog."

The Pew Research Center says that blogging among people aged 12 to 17 fell by half from 2006 to 2009.

However, a closer look shows that young people have not abandoned what we typically define as blogging: visiting an online site to read and post photos, videos and stories and participate in healthy back-and-forth discussions.

For example, the New York Times discovered that many people do not consider Tumblr to be a “blogging service” even though it features each of those elements.

Given Tumblr’s rise in popularity, any study seeking to measure the number of bloggers that doesn’t count that platform is going to paint an inaccurate picture of online activity.

Users are deserting LiveJournal and Blogger, but they’re more active than ever on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. That is, it’s not that young people are moving away from blogging, but rather that blogging itself is evolving.

Rather than pronounce the days of blogging to be over, let’s celebrate the increase in user-generated content on other sites and become less focused on the word “blog.”