Marc Tracy is ruing the decline of the blog. Its golden age is over, he says; in the new world of what the internet has become, with Twitter and Facebook and other such conduits, there is no longer much place for the personal political blog. 'Twitter has replaced any individual blog as the place the political conversation plays out'; and:
Less and less do readers have the patience for a certain writer or even certain subject matter. Instead, they use social media to efficiently pick exactly what they do and do not click on, rather than reading what a blogger or blog offers them.
Well, Tracy is focusing on the biggest hitters in the world of personal blogs, and he's probably studied statistical trends, as I for my part haven't. But I would like to enter a caution or two all the same.
There's no denying that the blogosphere, as it used to be called, has changed. One of the main changes has been how much the pattern of blog traffic has altered: once a large proportion of this came from other blogs linking to posts that bloggers found interesting or took issue with; now much more of it comes from Twitter and Facebook links. However, just judging by the visitors to my own blog, this doesn't inevitably mean either an irreversible decline in the overall numbers visiting personal political blogs, or that the readership established before the changes under discussion came about has departed, so to say Locke, Berkeley and Hume. Whatever may be the case for Andrew Sullivan, others of us continue as before and find it worth doing, for a variety of reasons. One reason, at least, is this: it may be true that the political conversation 'plays out' much more on Twitter and elsewhere, but it is rather harder to set out a reasoned argument on anything in 140 characters than it is in a blogpost - for which there are still readers, as there are for op-ed pieces in the press. (Via JF.)