I think there are two ways to blog: altruistically or narcissistically. If you're blogging altruistically you're blogging for others primarily and yourself secondarily. If you're blogging narcissistically you're mostly blogging for yourself.<p>Most of the great blogs that I visit are all done altruistically. They are well maintained, post useful information, and very rarely waste my time. They also require a huge amount of effort on the part of the blogger because they really have to do work to gather and present interesting and useful information for their readers.<p>What a lot of the press has referred to as blogging is "narcissistic." Instead of coming up with interesting information and vetting it for their readers they mostly just spew whatever thoughts they had that day onto the page. It doesn't take a huge amount of effort, but the signal to noise ratio is also very low.<p>With the rise of Facebook and Twitter, narcissistic blogging can happen more in the sphere you want it (your friend group). Narcissistic bloggers are usually doing it for attention and their friends' and acquaintances' attention is more important than strangers'.<p>Altruistic bloggers, on the other hand, have useful information to present so they want to present it to as large an audience as possible. While I think we'll see more narcissistic bloggers moving to Facebook and Twitter in the future, hopefully the altruistic bloggers will continue putting the time in for the public.
I know I should blog, and I have a blog that gets updated about once every three months. Blogging is really labor intensive. IMO making blogging truly streamlined and easy has still not happened. Posterous's blogging by email was a great attempt. I also liked a blog engine I ran into[1] that just pulled Markdown formatted text files out of a git repository (it was powered by Sinatra).<p>But regardless of the tools, truly quality blog posts take time and effort to plan out, research and write. The end result is the vast majority of blogs are nothing but noise (including my own).<p>One thing I am working on to fight this is getting my company to sanction a company blog. Where I can dedicate some real time to a development blog. The benefit being we can hopefully start attracting an audience, and gain a foothold when we open source some of our bits. The real goal being finding new developers when it's time to hire that much easier as we will hopefully be seen as a quality company to work for. Almost the same reason individuals blog and release stuff on github.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.restafari.org/introducing-marley.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.restafari.org/introducing-marley.html</a>
I think we've ended the historical period where younger people will always be more tech-savvy than their slightly older counterparts. I wonder if having internet and ubiquitous connectedness just be a part of the background for younger people will actually make them less likely to be early adopters of something unknown or up-and-coming.
Is Tumblr a blog? It's growing like crazy. OTH, Posterous growth as a blogging platform seems to have peaked, which may explain their pivot to Groups, which is a social networking and media sharing play, the heart of Facebook and instagr.am.
I think the reason that Grandmas have adopted technology at a faster pace is that technology as a whole is becoming easier to use - probably due to a stronger focus nowadays on UI/UX. As opposed to engineers being in charge of design, we now have more real designers in charge of design - see what's happened in spaces like email marketing with Mailchimp. Another obvious example but in hardware is the iPad. Grandmas don't have to worry so much about booting up, operating systems, etc. They just press a button and it works.<p>I think kids don't blog as much because it's so much easier for them to get an audience through their current social media networks - primarily Facebook. Most blogs don't have huge audiences - mostly just friends and family. So, why would someone create a separate blog and then try to drive traffic to that blog when they can just post similar content on Facebook or Twitter and have it served up to their friends and family? I'm sure they get way more comments on their Facebook updates than they do on a blog anyway. Particularly for a narcissistic blogger, that's what they're looking for anyway - affirmation.
We are becoming the borg. Teenagers don't blog because they don't have the time, and are becoming incapable of thinking independently of their collective. Information streams into their brain at a rate they are unable to comprehend, and so their world is this ultra-fast blur of data, just basic I/O, without any processing.<p>Oh, and stay off my lawn.
Kids don't blog because most don't write in essay form and are trending towards shorter form, shorter attention span communications.<p>Grandmas are signing up for FB in record numbers to see pictures of their grandchildren, which they obsess over.