Few of the activities covered in this report have decreased in popularity for any age group, with the notable exception of blogging. Only half as many online teens work on their own blog as did in 2006, and Millennial generation adults ages 18-33 have also seen a modest decline — a development that may be related to the quickly-growing popularity of social network sites.

At the same time, however, blogging’s popularity increased among most older generations, and as a result the rate of blogging for all online adults rose slightly overall from 11% in late 2008 to 14% in 2010.

Yet while the act formally known as blogging seems to have peaked, internet users are doing blog-like things in other online spaces as they post updates about their lives, musings about the world, jokes, and links on social networking sites and micro-blogging sites such as Twitter.

So it would be insane to argue that the information sharing, which the blogging phenomenon arguably sparked, shows any signs of decreasing. Facebook, whose most popular feature is the News Wall’s stream of updates from friends, has more than 500 million users. Laconic Twitter continues to grow and is now worth nearly $4 billion.

And then we continue to see blogs, both of the professional and pro-am type, dominating and redefining the media.

So what should we make of the decline in blogging among the young? Are they a post-paragraph generation? Is it just a phase that they’ll grow out of, gradually eschewing purely narcissistic Daily Booth sites where all you do is post a picture of yourself to embracing the intellectual exercise of actually forming full thoughts and communicating them to others?

Hard to say.

Of course, there’s no real way to define blogging, other than from a simple technical perspective, which is any web publication that publishes information easily in reverse chronological order. That category includes everything from adorable pet photos at Cute Overload to the personal blogs of everyday citizens to traditional news reporting done on blogs like Technologizer and Threat Level to link aggregation/commentary/reporting done at BoingBoing to the snark dished out at Gawker. (Which, oddly enough, might soon fail to actually count technically as a blog since its upcoming redesign largely gets rid of the reverse-chronological order publishing model — the so-called river — in favor of curated approach which keeps stories on a landing page longer.)

But perhaps Pew has stumbled on something — that we are witnessing another nail in the coffin of nuanced communication, which has been on life support since the advent of instant messaging and nearly snuffed out with the prevalence of texting.

Regardless if that’s true or not, the central vision of blogging — give citizens a nearly cost-free online printing press and let them make media — hasn’t died, even if many people find that it’s too much work for too few readers to write up their trip to Greece or opine at length on Sarah Palin or the indignities of Comcast customer service.

Just in the last two weeks, the power of cheap publishing tools vaulted an unknown grad student named Aaron Bady into the center of public debate over Wikileaks after he published a series of long, incisive, and conversation-changing essays on the point and nature of Wikileaks.

And for those who just want to express themselves, without turning into a thought leader or an internet celebrity, they’ve got lots of other printing presses now that are easier than the traditional Wordpress and Blogger blogging systems.

There’s the insanely popular Tumblr “blogging” system which grafts the idea of following onto blogging and where posts are often terse or just an image. There’s Twitter which limits you to 140 characters, a limitation that forces brevity and link sharing. And there’s Facebook, where you can easily share buckets of photos, stories you read around the web, and your mood, without having to beg your friends to read your blog.

So yes, perhaps blogging is on the wane, but blogging is also more prevalent than ever so long as you are willing to expand the definition of an ugly-duckling word that’s never had a real definition.

Authors: Ryan Singel

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