Then in the last year something new has happened, which I see as the combined rise of mobile Internet technology and Facebook. While smartphones have made us more e-mail-enabled than ever, I think people are actually sending less total e-mail as a result, substituting SMS texting and mobile use of social networks.

Facebook has brought for non-professional writers in us the same e-mail effect I saw when I jumped to WordPress: every wall or chat posting makes unnecessary at least one e-mail, maybe several.

And don’t forget that our youngest networked generation — teenagers — doesn’t e-mail at all, preferring the immediacy and intimacy of texting to almost anything else.

All true sentiments, of course.  I think the bigger epiphany for me at this stage, however, isn’t how email is declining as a defining medium of the web, but how, for a short time, there was a movement that enabled people to create and participate in an exchange of ideas in the wild.  ”Blogging”, you might call it.  Now, so much activity happens behind closed walls, and even if it isn’t, so much of it is shortened to 140 characters or less, that it isn’t private discourse one should be worried about, its the public one, shouldn’t it?

Granted, I have not been blogging as long as some graybeards, so the earliest recollection I can recall was when Technorati revealed some data on blogging which suggested that it had plateaued off.  It was last year, as I recall.  Lots of handwringing around that time.  Twitter existed.  Facebook existed.

I think my position then is the same as it is now.  For those who like / love / accept blogging, the diversification of online voice is an inevitable non-threatening event.  There were a LOT of blogs pre-Twitter (and even pre-Facebook) that were false starts and abortive events in the making.  There were many people calling themselves “bloggers” who were not really — in the sense that they tried it, then gave it up.  Wasn’t really their cup of tea.

And I think that is, as they say, totally “ok”.

The explosion of the ways people can share their opinion, voice, and mind capital is a very good thing.  It allows folks to find a niche for the way they want to express themselves.  And that’s totally fine, because folks who find Twitter is more their bag shouldn’t be blogging anyway.

Of course you can do both.  Its no more mutually exclusive than peanut butter and jam (which is to say that it can be quite complementary) — but I was referring to people who really find their voice on microblogging services to the exclusion of blogging.

Bloggers, or those who formerly blog, leaving for other new media forms of expression … well, it shrinks the pond for whoever’s left.  That usually means, I find, concentrating talent.  Which, as I believe, is a very good thing.

Blogging lends itself to a longer form of expression.  Something that can be rambling, but something that has the potential for distilled and substantive thought.  Without transmogrifying into a “this is why blogging is great post”, it also offers people to really own their ideas, and express it in a way that is available to everyone.  Not merely yoru Twitter group.  Or your “friends” (wherever they may be, in whatever social network they might be).  And for the Google-conscious of you, it certainly means that the public at large will better be able to find *your* opinion more easily as well — Twitter, Friendfeed, and all of their ilk are poorly indexed.

There is some further handwringing over how blogs have not innovated, or renovated, or something to that effect, which, I think is on the hogwash-y side of things.  Blogs have their place in the new media ecosystem, and it is one that is maturing, as we see blogs take their place — and the bloggers who own them — as part of the mainstream media.  Smaller bloggers may not consider entities like the “HuffingtonPost” or the “Daily Kos” “blogs” anymore by their sheer size alone.

But to separate them based on their size would be a ludicrous butchering of what a definition means, as whatever a ‘blog’ is should encompass all forms of that Thing in spite of its size.

The fracturing of online conversations was inevitable.  It will continue to happen ad infinitum, with the happy tension of aggregators trying to rein in all conversations at the same time.  Blogs have their place in all of that.  It was at there at the beginning and it will be there at the end.  

And that is totally ok.

So why am I here on Ted Murpy’s dime? A couple reasons.  First of all, I think Ted has made some strides in trying to bring bloggers and advertisers together in a win-win fashion.  Blogging is a tough business, no matter what language you speak, or where you find yourself in life.  It needs more friends, and that’s the sense I get from where Ted is coming from.

With PPP, his intentions weren’t bad, but they may have been executed in a way that wasn’t completely kosher, particularly with whole transparency thing and what Google may see as gaming the link system.  Ted’s got something new brewing with Social Spark, as a new means of bringing bloggers and advertisers together.  It seems above board on a lot of issues I had ranted about before (no-follow links, in-post disclosure amongst other things) and one day soon, I may just try it out.

Second reason is that I’m getting the chance to meet a lot of people. I’ve got to say I love meeting other bloggers / new media folk, and so this is really no exception.  This evening, for example, I got to meet Brian Clark and Tamar Weinberg.  Neil Patel and John Chow as well.  Yes, I even shook hands with John Reese and Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker (the latter of whom was gentlemanly of enough to feign recognizing me).  I also got to meet some panelists that I’ll be moderating including Lea Alcantara, as well as Steve Spalding, both of who, I might add (along with Rob, Lea’s husband), are excellent company. ;)  In the upcoming days, I’m also hoping to run into Loren Feldman (again), and Merlin Mann, who is delivering the keynote for Saturday.

I don’t anticipate the whole conference to be a pitch-a-thon for Izea.  If it is, of course, you’ll hear from me on that.  But it really seems to be more about bloggers and how to make them better at it.  And if that’s the case, I’ll be glad I came, not only as someone who is helping moderate a panel, but someone who can always learn a thing or three about the craft.

I guess it speaks to your own blogging habits as well.  I used to be able to blog when I got back from work and maybe after dinner.  I used to pride myself on how fast I could blog, but even so, it takes about 20 minutes of uninterrupted time to put something even remotely intelligible.

Why has blogging changed for me?  Well, I just don’t have 20 minutes of uninterrupted time any more, until the Boy goes to sleep.  And quite frankly, I’m not even doing most of the heavy lifting (points to wife).

And after that, there are other household obligations that need to be taken care of.  Perhaps I’m getting older, but I find that I just don’t have the stamina to stay up an extra 30 – 60 minutes to do extra stuff, when I have to be up the next day for work.

I can’t even imagine what it would be like to try all this with two children (or twins), nevermind one.

Bottom line — blogging has been taking a bit of a back seat to parenting these days, and has made me appreciate all of those “mommy bloggers” out there for two reasons:  *being* a mom, and being a mom AND a blogger ;)

Using Dan Farber, however, would be a TERRIBLE example. ;)

Interesting study from Third Age / JWT Boom, which shows how people over the age of 40 (presumably in North America, although there’s no mention that I can find of where they’re from) are engaged with social media on the Internets: the bottom line is that they’ve embraced email (in spite of the cacophony of cries that “email is dead“), but only a minority, about 20% were actively using social networking sites to keep in touch.

While another 20% might be interested, it seems like the vast majority just aren’t interested; furthermore, amongst the 50% who were neither using, nor interested, they gave reasons around privacy, time, and lack of benefit to using such services.

It seems like there was only one more thing that boomers were even LESS interested in and that was actively blogging (i.e. “writing blogging”).

In an interesting finding, boomers were *more* likely than younger users to participate in viral marketing campaigns, and more likely to share information about products or services with friends and family.

The interesting thing to me, actually, is that all of the above behaviours *perfectly* describe older members of my family of my parents generation.  They *still* find value and worth in forwarding email jokes and lists; they pretty much *only* do email; and, they question the worth of something like Facebook, while cautioning me about its privacy issues.  The only thing they “get” even less, of course, is blogging (and *me* blogging).

Does this sound at all familiar to any of you?  Or is it merely ageist nonesense?

// via marketing charts

Catch all three “blog” episodes at http://www.drhorrible.com

The funny thing is that this particular meme has some legs under other titles, such as “the evolution of conversation”, or “the further maturation of blogging”, or “the atomization of attention”.

But to declare blogging dead, and THEN spout off a list of reasons that are so myopic they border on cluelessness — its just plain narcissistic.

Here’s why.

His big claims as to why blogging dead revolves around a few ideas (I have parsed these heavily)

i) bloggers are dying to be heard via social “accelerants” like Digg or Techmeme

ii) they therefore spend more time promoting their posts than spending time *on* their posts, via Digg, Techmeme, or Twitter

iii) to excel in blogging means excelling in saying inflammatory things — i.e. link bait (yes, the irony is towering and overwhelming, I know)

iv) email lists avoid the promotion machine

v) email lists avoid the “problem” of an open conversation

I’m not going to debate each point, because, by now, I’m sure you’ve already seen the fallacy in each statement (but for a breakdown, see Steve Hodson).

But to suffice it to say that I found these ideas to be terribly narcissistic, only in so far that it seems narcissistic to condemn an entire way of communicating based on observations that really — by and large — involve experiences that are central to the way that a very narrow band of individuals have experienced them.

There are many, many, many other bloggers who don’t read Techmeme, and who don’t care.  In the niches they occupy there aren’t “social accelerants”, because they don’t yet exist for those niches.  And they may never yet.  Try submitting something to Reddit on the wonders of single parent hood / mommyhood, or Digg on some interesting, yet obscure, scientific factoid, for example.  You already know they’re not going anywhere.

And yet there are groups and ecosystems of bloggers out there, having a ball writing about these kinds of things.  They are just as valid and just as existential as tech bloggers, and other heavy weight, or wannabe heavy weight bloggers that Mr. Calacanis is basing his opinions on.

In fact, the kind of phenomenon Mr. Calacanis is describing really describes, I’d say, a tiny, tiny percentage of bloggers out there.  I mean, besides the tech blogging community, how many other bloggers are actively and as aggressively pursuing technologies like Twitter, Friendfeed, or Seesmic as a portion of their daily blogging “activities”?

You all know the round-about answer to that, and the answer of course is “nearly nil”.

So, to castigate and declare “dead” an entire medium like blogging based on some very narrow opinions is — well, yes, quite douchy indeed.  And I dare say its narcissistic as well, as you’re assuming “everyone” (i.e. the blogosphere at large) is experiencing the same malaise over blogging that one person (or a small group of people) are.

Blogging is maturing, that’s true enough.  There are tools now that didn’t exist years ago.  Its even easier.  And yet there are even more ways to broadcast your opinion and have other people interact back with you.  Its not that blogging is *DEAD* so much that blogging is changing, and its role is changing within the ecosystem of conversations and online communications.

And if you can’t see that?  Well, maybe you didn’t really get blogging in the first place.