One clear result of the rise of Twitter and Facebook is the ever-growing number of abandoned blogs out there.
Blogs have always had a high abandon rate. It's "cool" (well it was) to have a blog and it's dirt simple to start one. Much harder is the task of keeping it fed. Coming up with interesting topics to post about and then adding in images and links to make the "story" feel fleshed out is a lot of work.
Twitter on the other hand requires less than 140 characters, and if you don't have time to type 140 characters 3 or 4 times a day, you've got bigger problems than your posting schedule.
For many people blogs are/where a way of pointing at interesting articles. Much of the verbiage beyond the link and maybe some quoted text from the original was just through clearing, filler or "I agree with this" commentary of little value.
Twitter makes that kind of post seem terribly outdated. If I want to POINT to something now I just post it to Twitter and add a short, (hopefully) pithy reason why I think the link has merit and I'm done.
That means that "blog posts" now end up feeling like work. They are "longer" and "original". And that's a tall order for many of us.
This blog, my first one, (although it's lived on Blogger, Movable Type, Wordpress and now TypePad) is still what I officially call home online even though I don't visit very often. My first post was over eight years ago now. In that time I've done a fair number of those "long format" posts interspersed with lots of stuff that now seems better suited for other social network channels, particularly Twitter.
Why blog then?
I'm not giving up on this blog yet as I figure I WILL have more to say than will fit in 140 characters at some point, but I doubt my close identification with my blog will ever return.
