My name is Raven. I design and market visual advocacy tools for an NPO start-up in Chicago, IL.
Yellow is my favorite color.Anybody remember when I was ranting about this last year?
Blogging has morphed from a youthful showcase of randomness to a marketplace of maturing career identities and industrial discussion.
A recent article notes,
So why are young people less interested in blogging?
The explosion of social networking is one obvious answer. The Pew survey found that nearly three-quarters of 12- to 17-year-olds who have access to the Internet use social networking sites, such as Facebook. That compares with 55 percent four years ago.
With social networking has come the ability to do a quick status update and that has “kind of sucked the life out of long-form blogging,” says Amanda Lenhart, a Pew senior researcher and lead author of the latest study.
Furthermore…
The study, released Wednesday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, found that 14 percent of Internet youths, ages 12 to 17, now say they blog, compared with just over a quarter who did so in 2006. And only about half in that age group say they comment on friends’ blogs, down from three-quarters who did so four years ago.
The Pew study found, for instance, that the percentage of Internet users age 30 and older who maintain a blog increased from 7 percent in 2007 to 11 percent in 2009.
Just maintaining an online presence will be sufficient
It may no longer be necessary to start a blog to revolutionize your career – or your life. Maintaining a presence online will probably just be enough. If you are engaging with people in every way possible, online and off – a blog is not always the natural step.
Perhaps it will just be your Twitter presence. Maybe, even the connections you make on LinkedIn. Or, your uploads to YouTube.
One’s online legacy doesn’t have to be confined to [insert name] dot com. The world’s growing obsession with brevity and fast communication creates limiting effects for blogging and its potential audiences.
Blogging takes time. It requires patience and the willingness to suffer a learning curve.
The opportunity to express interesting ideas come from all sorts of directions. Not just a blog. Especially, not a blog.
