People seem to love to publish. They publish their thoughts, photos, poems, videos and favourite songs. It could be on their own blogs or on Facebook. In fact, updating your status on Facebook can also be called blogging. Blogging is simply sharing interesting things with your audience and encouraging interaction.
When I was a teenager I used to blog. I thought it was fun to share my thoughts with the rest of the world and read other blogs too. After registering on Facebook I “moved” there. My long blog posts became now short status updates.
Facebook – the social media giant developed into a multi-media rich social networking portal where you can invite all your friends and share your story with minimal friction. To publish and share in 2012 is really easy and that is what most people want. They just want to be given a tool that doesn’t require plugins or widgets and just ‘do it’. The blogs on the other hand require more time and effort, you have to know how to embed a video or what plugins to use. Many reports are showing that blogging is not as popular as it was before and that nowadays many people prefer Facebook or Twitter.
I think the reason to this is that the most people just don’t want to take the time and effort and pour their soul into a blog unless they are passionate about their subject, for example, fashion, politics, technology etc.
What do you think? Is Facebook killing the blogs?
I wouldn’t say that facebook is exactly killing blogs because I know several people who have a facebook account and a blog. However, facebook may somehow decrease the need to blog, especially among people, who don’t have the urge to write really long stories and who like to write short statuses every now and then instead (for example me). As you wrote, people do have the need to publish something and it doesn’t matter if it’s via facebook or a blog -it still could be called blogging. So maybe we should think about facebook as a new big blog instead of a killer of the blogs.
I do think Facebook makes some people who used to blog a lot abandon their blog. Some people publish their thoughts on blog and expect to have some discussions. It worked before Facebook come. But people now use facebook more rapid than blogs as a tool to know each other. However, as all people can easily add somebody as a friend even they might just met several times, blogs become a relatively private thing. When people want to publish somethings that he/she doesn’t want too many people to read, he/she will choose blogging instead of Facebook.
I don’t think facebook kills blogs in the sense that I think that many people who write blogs, tend to write longer stories than you would be able to post in a status update.
When you take travel blogs as an example, than I do think that facebook can replace a blog where you would post regular updates and pictures, as you can just upload your pic to facebook and give short status updates on there. But then there are always the people that don’t use facebook and you still want to keep updated.
Then, when people want to write something about fashion, cooking, photography etc., they usually do write a blog and then link to the blog in their status updates.
And I personally think that if people would just blog because they are really passionate about something and want to share this with the world, this would improve the quality of blogs in general.
I would even say that facebook might even promote blogging in the sense that they have developed apps to connect your blog to your facebook page. However, since blogging might be quite intimate or personal not everyone might choose to use this function. Furthermore, I don’t think you could say that facebook might exclude blogging as I find these options quite different. Facebook is used for social networking and presenting yourself, where blogging is more often used to express feelings or opinions. As Facebook is less anonymous I would say that people are more carefull with their postings. This seems to be quite the opposite for blogging, since this world is more anonymous people tend to express their real feelings more often. In some cases they blog to connect themselves to a group of ‘equals’. It might be however that people reduce their blogging because they are more into facebook now, but I still think that facebook will never take over the really personal or intimate types of blogging.