Blogging Versus Content Creation

Jonathan Crowe of The Map Room blog reflects on 20 years of blogging:

What faded away, I think, was the idea of, and self-identification as, a blogger. Lots of people started blogs in the format’s early years but didn’t keep up with them; social media was a better fit for what they wanted to do. Not many people start a blog qua blog to be a blogger nowadays.

Blogging never disappeared. People still post writing and photos and videos, and they share a window into their lives and thinking. But the gestalt of blogging is different today—on social media—and people now identify content creators. And with the changing self perception, the motivation for publishing stuff online has changed. On a weblog twenty, even ten, years ago, you would share for the sake of sharing, for the sake of documenting, or for the sake of learning:

The idea that someone with an intense interest in a subject but not much knowledge could start a blog as a way to explore the subject—“an exercise in self-education” is what I called it—was something that made sense in 2003. It might be a bit more archaic now

Bloggers publish for themselves first, and the content may or may not be valuable to others. Today, content creators publish to go viral or to build influence and a career.

The form and motivation of online publishing has changed, and so has the content. Online content is shorter now because of platform limitations, but shorter content is also more digestible and easier to share and therefore more likely to go viral. You need to work through a 1,000 word blog post commenting on the current state of the Internet before you share it, and you might not agree with all the arguments, so you might not share it at all. That’s different with a cute photo or a Tweet that reduces a complex topic to a 280-character zinger.