Blogs are dead again...sorta

You might have read the article in The New York Times called Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter. The Pew Research Center found that from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half; now 14 percent of children those ages who use the Internet have blogs. Among 18-to-33-year-olds, blogging dropped two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier. Old farts like me weren't polled, apparently. The article said kids found Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr (which is...uh...a blog platform) easier and more sociable.

The fact is blogs – like printed books – will never die. Blogs will always be a place to find more substantive work than status updates on Facebook or 140 character tweets. The majority of news sites are now built on blog platforms, such as Huffington Post and even CNN, allowing readers to interact and leave comments. Personal blogs fill a niche – whether it's sharing recipes, celebrity gossip or book reviews.

As I stated in a post last year, the number of visitors to my site has dropped off dramatically while the number of readers and interactions at Facebook and Twitter continue to rise. Does that mean I'm going to stop blogging? No. I think everyone should have a hub, whether it's a blog or static website. I like the way a blog archives your writing and thoughts, where on Facebook and Twitter they are a flash in the pan unless you want to scroll endlessly through previous posts and tweets.

Blogs have certainly shown their worth in the poetry community lately, especially in the debate over whether or not Tony Hoagland's poem "The Change" is racist (check out Seth Abramson's lengthy post at The Suburban Ecstasies) and the controversy over the theft of the Langston Hughes cutout from Busboys and Poets in D.C. (a good place to start is Sandra Beasley's Chicks Dig Poetry blog) in protest of the low fees they pay to poets. Blogs have facilitated discussion on these issues, which is what a good blog should do.

I don't think blogs are dying, just evolving. Declaring the death of blogging is premature and greatly exaggerated.