Online Media Cultist

Hopped up on coffee and in the midst doing my daily frantic scan of social media sites, blogs, websites, and e-mail, a strange question arose in my mind:

Will today’s kids think about blogging in the same way that my generation does?

It’s an odd question on a few levels. I’m in my mid-30s (how did I get this old this fast? is a question for a different day, I’m happy to report) and didn’t gain access to this magical medium that I like to call the interwebs until I was in college.

I first heard the term “weblog” while working at TechTV circa 2001. I thought it and the now more commonly used term “blog” to be at the same time strange and striking. Blog, I recall thinking, sounds like the kind of sound that comes out of the burbling depths of a swamp, or cauldron, or dungeon, or the like.

After running an e-mail-based newsletter for more than a year, I became engaged in the more or less daily art and science and self-inflicted torture of blogging in 2004.

So that’s all quick background to the question that bubbled up (bloggy-like) as I read the following paragraph, which kicked off a Newsweek examination of microblogging:

The first thing Amanda Mooney, 22, does when she wakes up in the morning is fire up her laptop. She opens “a crazy amount of tabs” and checks in on her Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube friends. A self-described “digital native” who graduated from Emerson College in Boston this summer, Mooney contributes her thoughts to her new employer’s blog at Edelmandigital.com, as well as at Americanshelflife.com. She chats on AIM, publicly bookmarks favorite posts on Digg and Del.icio.us. And, of course, she twitters. And twitters and twitters.

So Mooney is part of what we might consider the “hyperconnected” set, and she blogs as part of her professional career.

But for many other young hyperconnected types, is there the same lure to invest the time, energy, and patience to set up a “formal blog” as opposed to simply engaging in a cornucopia of social media and microblogging platforms?

I suppose it has a lot to do with motive and interest, but the short answer is that there are simply so many more options to engage and socialize and communicate online now than there were five or even three years ago. For those who grew up taking the Internet and even advanced social media applications somewhat for granted, setting up a standalone blog may not make a lot of sense.

At the least, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, or one or more of several dozen other social networking sites will likely be in the mix for starters. Throw in a Last.fm or Pandora for music. Then we get into Flickr for images, YouTube for video, Digg or Reddit or Mixx or del.icio.us for finding and sharing stories. Now we can move up to the level of “microblogging” and add Twitter, FriendFeed, and Tumblr and the like to the stew.

Now, the interesting thing is too of course that blogging can play a role in many of the applications listed above. You can blog on social networking sites, and some would argue that posting “tweets” to Twitter is in effect blogging in micro form.

The difference though is that in setting up a standalone blog – even if it’s as simple as setting up a blogspot site via Blogger – you’re establishing a place for more traditional blogging, meaning open-ended posts, comments, and the like. There will still be many attracted to doing this, but I imagine the new generation of bloggers that we’ll see may be different and perhaps a smaller and more select group than we’ve seen in the past.

Steve Hodson, for one, writes that bloggers should be thanking Twitter and FriendFeed, as the rise of these new communications platforms means “less noise for us to fight our way through in order to get through to the readers.”

Is Steve right? Yes… but bloggers still have more competition than ever before. While there may be relatively less competition based on those who abandon or choose not to take up blogging to engage primarily on social media/microblogging platforms, ironically it will be those who do engage the most on these new platforms that will be able to drive the most attention and traffic back to their home websites.

This is all a longwinded way of saying that the game is changing. And that’s a good thing – who wants things to stay the same for too long anyway?