Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter
SAN FRANCISCO — Like any aspiring filmmaker, Michael McDonald, a high school senior, used a blog to show off his videos. But discouraged by how few people bothered to visit, he instead started posting his clips on Facebook …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Times piece lands in the middle of a blog-obituary argument the corpus has been running since 2006, when AdAge argued a blogger is just a writer with a cooler name, through ReadWriteWeb's mixed-read of the landscape and Nick Carr's late-2008 question about who killed the blogosphere. What is new here is the demographic evidence: high-schoolers like Michael McDonald abandoning low-traffic blogs for Facebook and Twitter, per the article's own confirmed reporting.
The pushback was immediate and came from inside the blogging world itself — Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard called it another misleading 'blogs r dead' story, and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg framed it as drift rather than death. Notably, the same weekend saw Twitter suspend and then reinstate UberMedia's API access for UberTwitter and Twidroyd, a reminder that the networks absorbing these young writers control the pipes.
First-order effects
- Teenage creators like McDonald are moving their output from standalone blogs to Facebook and Twitter, choosing the networks' built-in audiences over the effort of building blog traffic.
- Blog-platform advocates are forced onto the defensive within hours of publication — Rosenberg and Mullenweg both published rebuttals arguing the trend is drift, not decline.
Second-order effects
- Creators who trade blogs for social networks swap ownership for reach on someone else's terms; the UberMedia suspension-and-reinstatement saga the same week showed how quickly a network can cut off third parties built on its platform.
- Facebook and Twitter consolidate their position as default distribution channels for new writers and filmmakers, raising the bar for any blog tool trying to win back younger users — the same audience the Guardian noted chasing 'hit websites' back in its 2008 lookahead.
Third-order effects
- If the drift holds, personal publishing splits structurally between owned independent sites and rented network audiences, with the 'blogger' identity dissolving into platform-specific posting.
- The recurring blog-is-dead cycle — 2006, 2008, now 2011 — looks set to become a fixture of tech media itself, with each round contested by the platforms whose fortunes depend on the answer.
The trend: Personal publishing is migrating from self-hosted blogs to closed social networks, with each wave of young creators trading editorial independence for built-in distribution.