Monday, June 30, 2008

The death of personal blogging -- more than just an excuse for my lack of posts!

I know it's been more than a week since I posted anything. Truth be told I don't have that many people reading this, so I doubt anyone noticed, but once you start something, you feel obliged to keep it up. It's like my inner monologue and I feel guilty when I neglect it.

My excuses are the usual -- I was ill for more than a week, my kid's schedule was overwhelming as he finished school for the year, then started summer camps, and plus my family took five days away as a short holiday. But hey, none of them prevented me from blogging, so much as prevented me from thinking about blogging.

Which is why this article in the Tyee was so interesting. It's called the Death of Pleasure Blogging, and the author argues that blogging for the heck of it is so five minutes ago. Business and media blogging is growing, but pleasure blogging is becoming too much work. Microblogging --- updating your status in Facebook or Twitter or the like -- is easier.

The move from big blogs to smaller ones says a lot about our cultural attention span. One or two lines of text are about as much writing as we can handle -- either creating or consuming it. Which begs the question, why did I write a bloated 750-word blog exposé? I could have just Twittered it in a line or two.

I've yet to embrace Twitter, but I admit to updating my Facebook status more regularly than I do this blog. But in my defense, I use Facebook for my side business. So it's not really personal blogging, is it? ;-)

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