The end of personal blogs

I have completely neglected my blog. So has everybody else.

Of my friends with blogs, half of them have not updated in 3 months. One hasn't updated in over a year. In fact, the most recent update on any blog was a full month ago!

Blogs come and go, that's a given. People have short attention spans. But when an entire group of blogs fades out of existence, there must be something else afoot. Our personal blogs are being replaced in great quantity by structured "social networking" websites such as Facebook and microblogging services like Twitter.

The reality is that those services have provided better alternatives to achieve the goals that we were trying to achieve with blogging. For a small personal blog that only gets read by friends and family, the focus is mostly on updating those people about our personal lives. Facebook is now the most popular way to do this, and it takes much less effort than blogging.

I've spent some time thinking about how this affects me and the handful of people that read my blog. I have decided that I will not give up on blogging, but rather pursue a different direction. In the future, my posts are likely to be of a more technical nature which will reflect on the nature of my interests.

I hope that you will continue to find my posts interesting, and I look forward to reading your comments.