The State of the Blogosphere

and it's it's really a big thing. I mean, there's a whole bunch of them out there. It's basically changed the way that we participate in and consume news media and uh and even pursue interests that are outside the news, things that aren't necessarily what what I guess the mainstream would consider newsworthy, but depending upon your interests might be very relevant to you. Right, So, very specific types of interest groups have their own types of blogs, and um,

they covered just about every subject. And really, when you think about it, this is an extension of something that people have been doing for centuries, which is mostly just recording their own thoughts. Yeah, I think I think that for yeah, millennia. In fact, it's about how long people have been doing that. You know, caves, the original blogs, maybe the cave blogs, but but but digital blogs as we know them. It actually kills me thinking about this

because I sort of grew up using them. I mean not not when I was a child, but certainly through high school and college because they started in about and this is one of those times what I'm about to see Jonathan's I start twitching because that that is not when he was growing up. Necessarily I got married. Ah yeah.

But and to be fair, before anyone starts writing in and saying, hey, I know that there were blogs that existed, but that is that is the first time that that someone called a dated personal content update a weblog, right

web blog. So so like in the documentary series Star Trek, where you had the Captain's log, where the captain would keep a log of the events that we're going on, usually with some sort of snarchy comment directed at some poor crewmember who may or may not been known as Wesley Crusher, then um, yeah, it's same sort of things.

In this case, it was generally speaking, at least in the early days of a sort of a personal diary kind of thing that you just wanted to share with a larger audience, or maybe a collection of links to things of interest that you had found around the internet. You know, a little bit curation going on there as well. But but the person who coined this term was Jordan

Barger of robot Wisdom. Okay, important, And that was December seventeenth actually, And what I what I loved about doing this episode is that the dates are so concrete because it was on the Internet and it was necessarily recorded, and so everything is extremely clear cut. It's much easier than, for example, when we were researching Tesla and everything was kind of like how this thing happened? It was yeah, yeah, and and and before you start asking, well, I'll ask Lauren, Lauren,

So where did blog come from? A blog came a little bit later, I think, uh maybe maybe a ninety nine. Peter Merholtz joked that he was going to pronounce it we blog in instead instead of a weblog, weblog, it's blob blog because it was becoming a community. And so yeah, so that was shortened down to blog and then bloggers were and of course we have variations on this already. I mean there are people who do video versions of a blog, video logs, blogs, blogs, and then, of course

Felicia Day, the Internet darling, a wonderful person. I've met her a couple of times, very nice lady, love uh. And she has her own video log that she calls a flog for Felicia's log, not that she actually flogs people. As far as I know, she has not done that. But not not not not on the air. I'm gonna stop conjecturing about Felicia Day. I haven't seen every single episode, so I can't say for certain, but none of the

ones I watched involved any actual flogging. Um. But moving back into the history of blogging, I'm sorry you just shorted out my entire my entire brain with that one. But it happens. Yeah, yeah, back into it, back into the history there. Um But what long before Felicia Day was was doing whatever it is that she does on her her own uh flogs? Uh. Peter Merho coined the term, and also the year that basically blogging as we know it sort of launched, Uh, Pyra released blogger that's h

V Williams and Meg Horahan. Does that sound like a way that you might pronounce that name. That's that's just how I would pronounce it. So excellent. Uh, Rock Soup launched, Brad Fitzpatrick starts started live Journal, a few of those really basic, original big ones. Yeah, the big platforms, and these were important tools because you know, I know it's hard for people to imagine it now, people who weren't using the web when it first started. Uh, And it's

it's something that you don't run into these days. But when when web pages were first a thing, they tended to be static. So you would create a web page and you wouldn't really change it very much because for one thing, it was a real hassle to do it. Oh, sure, you might add a page, or you might update it, you know, once every once in a while to include new information, but it certainly wasn't daily, right, It wasn't

And it wasn't a log right right. You were generally either replacing something that was already there, or you might add a paragraph, but you're not creating a log of of of entries. You are just editing one page over and over, maybe adding another page like a link you might link to a second page or whatever. But it was not easy to record a series of events because

the tools weren't there. So you start seeing the development of these tools and the distribution of these tools that make it easier for people to have this outlet to

to communicate. Right before then, even if you did want to create a log, you could certainly do so yourself, but you had to code it yourself, and so only people who were pretty well familiar with that web programming languages were going to be doing that, right Yeah, And and this is I mean, you know, it's it's easy for us to take for granted now, but trust me, if you had been surfing the web back when I was first starting the web, and I know some of

my listeners, I know you guys were there with me, it was just such a totally different world. It is impossible for me to think of, based on my first web page, that I would be able to have an outlet that would allow me to update so frequently and seamlessly.

Oh yeah, absolutely. And I guess it's a good good thing to point out that blogs tend to have a similar UH structure, in the sense that whatever was the most recent post tends to be at the top of whatever the blog is, and then the earlier posts are chronologically ordered in reverse order, so the earliest blog post is at the bottom of the chain, so it might be several pages back, depending upon the layout of the blog. Now, Lauren, I didn't ask you this before the podcast Excellent pub Quiz.

Did you have a live journal account? I, in fact did have a live journal account. I created mine in two thousand three. I you know, I don't even know when I created mine. I I can't remember the last time I logged into mine. I logged into mine while researching this article, and that was the first time that I had logged in. I switched from from live journal

to blogger maybe around two thousand seven. I want to say, well, live Journal, the last time I remember looking at it, it looked like it had really started to lose a lot of the community that was there. I mean, obviously I was not the only person to have drifted away from that platform, but I do remember back in the day, the live journal was one of those places that almost

all of my friends had an account their. In fact, to uh, you know, a lot of us didn't have access to things when I first came out, like Facebook, because we were not in college and Facebook was reserved just for college students. In the early days, right right, And and Facebook wasn't a blogging platform either, right, Yeah.

I think when I first got on Facebook, and I didn't I I also didn't get on Facebook until only just a couple of years ago, actually really like two thousand nine, I want to say, um, but but when I was first using it, I feel like a lot of people were moving there from live journal, and therefore we're using it like they were using live journal. They were posting a lot more notes and more long form content, and and over time I think that that's really shortened

down to to this sort of micro blogging that's occurring today. Yeah, and we'll talk more about that when we get into what the state of the blogosphere is today. But yeah, in those early days, it was really exciting because what this blogging world did was it opened up the world of publishing in a way online publishing to an enormous

crowd of a huge audience. It gave voices to people who you who you might never have read anything from before, and also let you It wasn't until that Opened Diary launched, which started really allowing people to comment on other people's blogs. Before then, it was a little bit like the way that tumbler is today, Like you might see something and then take that link and repost it and post your own comments about it and start a conversation that way.

But it wasn't. It wasn't until it was really um that there were tools out there for for incorporating comments and to create a dialogue as opposed to just shouting into the atmosphere and hoping people are hearing you, right, um, yeah, And that's another really key component to what makes blogs so enduring. And uh, you know, what was also interesting to me is that blogs were being used not just by by folks like like me and you, Lauren, before

we were big time podcast stars. They were being used by you know, by by actual celebrities or by writers, journalists, people who already had outlets, but they were using blogs to express themselves in ways that they might not otherwise be able to, or to provide more context to whatever it was they were doing. We even began to see

early early on companies get interested in blogs. It became a possible outlet for a company to have a dialogue with either customers or potential customers, right the same way that it gave people that you might have never listened to a face on the internet. It also gave company companies kind of latched onto it and said like, hey, we can use this to to allow people to see us at a more ground level, a more human level. Yeah.

And and and in fact, a lot of companies, especially in the tech sector, which again should be no surprise, but in the tech sector, a lot of companies began to allow their their employees to blog and even created or provided tools for them to do so. Not that it was a compulsory thing, but they were allowed to and they didn't necessarily have to blog about what it was

they were doing. So it wasn't like a corporate sponsored you need to go out here and message that this next product that we're coming out with is awesome and let people know. It was more like, no, if we give them the tools, they'll they'll they'll do it. They'll do it themselves. They'll they'll talk about what they're interested in. Occasionally that might be something that we are specifically doing, but if it's not, that's okay. And uh, and so

it really helped engender the spirit of blogging. Yeah. Yeah, and you know, I don't think that I don't think that the original creators of all of this, expected it to to grow in such a ridiculous way. Um, I've got a quote from from me from Mega Horahan, and I really hope that's how you say her name. She said, we joked about the idea that people could start change in far away places and revolutionary things would happen. But to see that it's actually happening, I get a thrill.

I see it everywhere. Yeah, and and that's that's so much fun. I mean, that's and and to really understand and why blogging is important and to understand its impact, all you really have to do. You know, we've been talking about, well we all know what happened in two thousand. That's the dot com crash. So you have all these big web companies that started up and uh and and they had inflated stock prices, they didn't have proven revenue

generating models. There are all these issues that that combined to make a bubble that burst, and then you had the dot com crash and as a result, lots of different companies went under. This is also the dividing line between what some people call web one point oh and web two point oh. Now those are mainly marketing terms. Yeah, it's it's no riley thing. It's sort of like a buzzword. But but it does give you a useful shorthand to talk about certain aspects of web pages that became um

more important than others. So, for example, the old static formula, that web page that you put up and you only occasionally tweak but you don't really have any dynamic elements on it, that was shown to not be a very viable, long lasting strategy. It was much more interesting to have a dynamic kind of web page where things were changing. It gave people a reason to return to that website.

It gave it which gives you more ad revenue by the way, and and I mean, obviously money is one of those things that's underlying all this, but even beyond that, it creates that amazing thing that all companies strive for engagement, where people are wilfully coming to your website and engaging with you, hopefully in a positive way. And so the blogs show they had these elements built in. Like there was the element of expression. You are able to blog

about whatever you like. You can change dynamically. You can update several times a day or a week or whatever. However your sched to allows and like you were pointing out, Lauren, the common ing feature was a huge part of what web two point oh is all about. It is this idea that there is a dialogue, it's not just a one way communication. Another company that we talked about recently, Amazon, one of the reasons that that people cite it as a as a survivor of the dot com crash was

because it had that customer reviews. Yeah, which that that's one of those elements that is often associated with web two point oh. So blogging was really kind of a an ideal representation of what web two point oh was all about. And uh, I think that's one of the reasons why the trend was not only surviving through the dot com crash era, it was thriving so Unlike the traditional websites that uh that that did not do so well or the startup companies that ended up floundering, blogging

continued to do pretty well. And we're gonna talk in a second all about how it blossomed from that little bitty plant of promise back in two thousand into the enormous industry it is today. But before we do that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay, so back to the discussion about blogging. So around two thousand we had the dot com crash and uh, and blogging makes its way through mainly because again this is

a user generated sort of platform. It's it's not reliant on some other company other other than the fact that the platforms themselves were developed by other companies, right. But you know, and someone has to host that web space, and there was all kinds of advertising that was worked in slowly over the years. So in two thousand three, Google acquired Piro, which again were the people who had launched Blogger, and they actually made Blogger free to use

at that point, right right. I think before then, well that there had been paid tiers. I think most most blogging platforms had paid tiers. There there was some kind of free for use thing and then a premium users us get extra space, etcetera. Right right right? Um? Well, yeah, that and that was huge. I mean, with Google behind the the company that created a blogger, then that meant that it definitely raised the visibility even beyond what it

already was. Yeah, it raised the visibility enough that by two thousand four, um, there are about ten million blogs in action around the world. Um and blog in fact, became Miriam Webster's word of the year. It was those you know, it was a buzzword. Was everyone was was kind of participating this. Uh. It was the year of the US presidential election, and both major political parties gave

credentials to bloggers at their conventions. Well, we'll get into some discussions about blogging versus journalism, I'm sure, because there are a lot of discussions to be had. Uh, keeping in mind that some journalists are bloggers. Some some bloggers have graduated if you want to call it, or maybe it's a lateral move. It's a different things that to

be a blogger, you just need a platform. Now, to be a great blogger, you need lots of talent and thoughts exactly, but you but really just to be a blogger. Anyone with an access to a platform can be a blogger, you know. But to be a blogger who who creates newsworthy or at least information that is interesting to read and is useful, then you have to have this talent

and ability. Um and and journalists, true journalists, if we're using the word the way it was meant to be used, have to go through quite a bit of training to get to a point where they are able to craft a story properly. Um. And you know, I'm not saying that that that I idealized journalists or I don't consider myself a journalist. I'm a writer. I'm not a journalist. I don't think even I don't think I'm even a writer.

I mean, you know, it's as I read some cool stuff online and then I say it to you guys, hopefully relatively pretty ways. But but yeah, there there is a difference, right journalism, especially if you're talking about investigative journalism, that there's a very specific set of skills that go along with that. And it's a discipline. And I dropped out of journalism in school, so you you know about it. You you you lack all the discipline you need because

you didn't That's okay. I never went to journalism school, and yet I was occasionally put into the role of journalists and I learned how hard that job is. And so there's there's not I don't know if it's as pronounced now as it used to be, but I remember the first time I went to c e. S. There's the reporters section, the press section, and then they had a blogger lounge, and your badge determined which of those you went into, whether it was the press lounge or

the blogger lounge. And it just felt like there was this crazy division there, some class division. I'm picturing free martinis and and sorts of things and press side and exactly I got the press badge. Yeah, so I was in the press section and and I didn't know any better. I didn't know blogging from journalism. I was. I was a writer for How Stuff Works, which was, you know, writing articles. Uh, But even then, I felt like there was a bit of classism there. Um. I think that

might be less so today. And part of that is the changing nature of blogging. And and again we'll talk about that. But two thousand four, when that that era you're talking about, that was also the same year that Technicoty released their State of the Blogger Sphere report. Right

well around around that election, rather Gate happened. And this was when I don't know if you remember this or not, but this this is when um CBS wound up redacting a report that had been made off of unauthenticated documents after blogs challenged it. And that's crazy, I mean, I mean, that's that's wonderful. I mean that is driving investigative journalists well. And there was also the year that we saw started seeing reports on events be four of the mainstream media

picked it up. So bloggers would, especially for very very niche oriented blogs. There was, um, there were these blog blogs that were all about bicycles, right, so they're all about bicycling. You wouldn't think that this would be a blog that would break a news story, but they did. Back in two thousand three two four. Uh, there's a bike lock company, uh, and they create a product called kryptonite.

And back at this time that particular lock, this Kryptonite lock, it was discovered that you could pick the lock using uh, pretty handily available materials and without too much trouble. This is a huge deal. I mean, this is a company that's marketing its product as being something to secure your bike. And anyone who owns a bike knows like these can be really expensive and and and very attractive targets for thieves.

So when that information broke in the blogs, it was in the blogosphere for like a week before the mainstream media picked up the story. So we're already seeing, even in these early days, that blogs are playing a role in breaking the news, not just you know, regurgitating it, which is again another common perception of blogs is that they'll they'll look at some news reports only re reporting everything right, right, not adding any other commentary, because that's

not what people do all the time on the internet. Yeah, that's not that's not entirely true. But um, but so so what did what did this technicraty report this first inaugural? The first thing it said was that the first inaugural. The first thing it said was that from June two thousand three to October two thousand four, the number of blogs increased by a factor of eight eight times the number of blogs, so so in in uh, you know,

a year's time essentially, um. And that they reported that twelve thousand new blogs were being created each day, not blog posts, blogs, so it said there's an averagely it averaged out to a new blog created every seven point four seconds. Four hundred thousand posts were being created each day, which averages out to four point six uh posts per second, so not you know, not every four point six seconds, four point six posts every second. We're going up now.

They did also point out that just under half of the blogs that they were tracking um about them had not had an update in the last three months, which that's a That's another another facet of blogging is that it's something that a lot of people get into and they experiment with and then maybe lose interest with. Yeah. Yeah, not everyone obviously, but there's there's It's definitely one of those things that a lot of people try and then

a smaller percentage stick with it. And and with any with any daily journaling kind of habit, I think you know, it takes what like sixty six days of doing something in a row before your brain really like an average of that, before your brain really kicks into a habit something something like that. Yeah, And and most bloggers even today, if you follow the the different metrics that technicrati UH ends up following, don't blog once a day. They're blogging

maybe three times a week. So you know, you're talking about it takes even longer for you to build that in if it's it's something you actually have to think about, it's not something that you're just you know, compelled to do. But yeah, that there were some interesting things from that first UH State of the Blogosphere. Their last, by the way,

State of the Blogosphere was in eleven. And the reason why that was the last one is that the nature of blogging was changing so much that Technorati came to the conclusion that calling the report the State of the Blogosphere was no longer truly accurate. Yeah, yeah, that it was just that it doesn't encompass what's really going on because social networking has caused such a huge disruption in the way that that individuals and companies and organizations approach

online interaction that blogging was too narrow a focus. However, in that report, uh, they identified bloggers and they put them into five categories. So your five categories of bloggers are hobbyists DING, part time professionals DING, full time professionals DING, corporate ding, and entrepreneurs DING. And so out of those five different types, they said that the hobbyists were the vast majority. They represented six of the blogging population. So

these are people with personal blogs. It may be about their own lives, it may be about their community, it may be about specific interest they have, but it's it's a hobby. It's not their job. The part time and full time professionals, uh, they were only getting a small amount of money from blogging. Like in almost every case, blogging was not their prime source of income, right, right, because that's really difficult. For example, you know, I've had

that blogger blog for a few years. I have made a grand total of I think twenty two dollars and eight cents on advertising on its. Well, you are below the average the mean, Well, I should say you blow the mean the mean income non salary. So this is this is someone who's making money from their blog. But there it's not a sound it's not part of their their professional role. So it's you can't because otherwise you have to figure out, like, well, what percentage of your

salary is at, and that would be impossible. But but for people who are making money directly from blogging, the mean salary in seventeen thousand dollars seventeen thousand one dollars, so seventeen grand a year. Oh, I mean, you know that's that's not good. But you know, next next to my twenty two dollars, that's pretty okay. I mean, you know, I'm and granted I blog, maybe you can you can go find it if you really want to know. It's

I blog maybe three times a year these days. So I assume that they're posting more often than that, but right right, um, probably. But the the other elements of the report that were kind of interesting to me report where that so the professional bloggers were about eighteen percent of the overall blogging population, corporate bloggers about eight percent um.

And that could be that it was corporate bloggers where identify as people who blogging was part of their job, but it was probably not the primary, uh job role they had. It was just something they had in addition to everything else they do, right, I imagine, especially by two thousand and eleven, more people were being hired on as a social media experts uh, as an umbrella rather than just bloggers. How you would come to that new social media at your year it's the entrepreneurs made up

about so corporate eight percent entrepreneurs. But then you think, okay, well, if you are someone who's your your role is to create new business, like you are a visionary who's out there to try and build something that did not exist before, blogging is a great outlet to be able to connect

with people. Absolutely, yeah. It lets you get your personality out there and kind of build yourself into that, you know, hopefully rock star status that people are going to want your products because they're your products, not just because they're cool products. I mean hopefully that too, right, right, Yeah, to identify with like a particular lifestyle or personality type, that kind of thing. Um. Yeah, And and they Tangnaratti also broke down some demographics. Uh. This is all based

off surveys that Technaroti put out too. So when I give these percentages, it's based upon the survey responses they received. They may not be truly reflective of reality, right, but but I know the people who responded. Three fifths of them were mail so uh so more than half of the respondents are mail. Uh. And most of them were between the ages of twenty and forty four. One third of them were over forty four, so uh not as

many younger bloggers. Uh. And in fact, that might be an interesting thing to watch in the future to see if blogging becomes less important over time as the as the population ages, because it may be that younger people don't pick up blogging at all and they adopt some other format. Uh. And we'll talk a little bit about some of that. Yeah. Well, just just another quick fact

in there. Um. As of two thousand and ten, according to a Pew Internet research blogging was in decline among twelve to thirty three year olds, but on the rise among year olds. Yeah, yeah, there you go, and uh it says, uh the the report from Technology I'm going to quote directly here. It said a large number of respondents who are blogging more are driven by both personal and professional benefits to do so, along with their interactions

with their audience. Many corporate bloggers and entrepreneurs say they are blogging more because it has proven to be valuable for promoting their business and also valuable to their profession, which is respondents. And and that they noticed that people who said they were not blogging as much mainly cited the reason of I need more time, like's it takes up so much time and I don't want to sacrifice that time. I need to spend time with my family for those people who you know value that I don't.

I don't know any of those. Or I need to spend more time on Twitter, or I need to spend becausit my wife's blog with this point is what I do. UM anyway, that I found it really an interesting report, especially when you start breaking down those demographics. And now today they have Technarotti does a new kind of report. It's not again not called the State of the blog

is Fear anymore. Now, it's called the Digital Influence Report, and they identify uh, entities, whether they are people or organizations or whatever, that they call influencers, and then they look at how the influencers are using various outlets on the Internet to connect to their audiences. And blogging is one of those outlets. It's not the only one, it's still one of the most popular ones that are being used by companies right now. And uh, it's interesting to me.

I was looking at their their statistics. They say that eight scent of the top influencers blog for themselves. So even if they're not blogging for their company or whatever right they are, they do maintain a blog. And out of the ones who are blogging, of them have more than one blog, but fewer than six, so between between two and five blogs that they maintain themselves. And um and out of all the people who are blogging, a six of them prefer to use text still to blog,

so they're still writing out these posts use video. So video blogging. While I think of it as being this huge thing, only a tiny percentage of all bloggers are really using it. I'm kind of the opposite. I always think of it as a very fringe sort of thing. But but that's because I don't like my computer to make noise at me. So yeah, I don't listen, I don't watch. I don't watch as many videos as perhaps I think it's because I know a lot of video bloggers at this point, and so it's it's just it's

just sample. Yeah, it's just always in front of me. So that's why, that's why I think of it as being, you know, a larger thing. And then only four use audio. So we're in a we're in an elite for you, although what we do is not really blogging, right, No, no, it's not. It's it's not it's well, it's probably more personal than than a lot of you guys want to hear. Sometimes apologize for that, but but but actually, I mean,

you know, the entire point of blogging is personal. Way back in two thousand six, Time named their person of the Year. You, Yeah, I remember, I remember people getting a little snarky about that. People on the Internet got snarky. Well not just on the internet, but yes, particularly on the Internet. Yes, but it was not restricted to the Internet. Well sure, but you know, just just as a kind of signpost of of how big it was. Then, I think that that the fact that that that a publication

like Time picking that up. Yes, well it was it was our time. Literally, I'm just gonna I'm I'm shaking my head. There should be some kind of sound effect for when Lauren shakes her head that Time was on our side. Yes it was. It just makes me think that you're that demon from Fallen This is bad. Well, I haven't thought about that in a long time, I speaking of Time. Sorry for that all that. That was a ridiculous, uh little tangent. But yeah, the changing nature

of blogging is is happening right now. I mean we're seeing lots of other products coming out that are making blogging transformative. So things like tumbler. Oh yeah, yeah, which which debuted in two thousand and seven, I believe, Yes, I found it then. Yeah, it's it's actually been around for a few years, quite a few years now when you think about it. But it's it's like I really wasn't aware of Tumbler. I mean, this makes me a terrible tech guy, right, but I wasn't really aware of

it until a couple of years ago. I don't. I don't have data on when I on when I launched. I think I probably launched my first tumbler around two thousand eleven, I think the same year that I went to a WordPress. So yes, another another platform that a lot of bloggers have adopted. The interesting thing I find about a lot of the platforms you see today are that they give you a great deal of flexibility and how your your blog appears to the to the viewers.

So you aren't you know. When we think back to the live journal days, there was only so much customization you could do. If you could code your own if you wanted to, you could always get back into the HTML and do what you wanted if you knew how to do that or uh yeah, yeah, yea one yeah. Once you got back into the back end, you could you could alter it a bit. But even even with that, there was a certain kind of structure that, you know, when you saw it, you'd think, oh, they must be

using live journal, you know. But but when you get into some of the modern blogging tools, you might visit a site and have you know, not even realize that it's built on one of these platforms because they are that versatile. Yeah, there are. They're actually sixty one million, seven thousand, hundred and fourteen word press sites currently on the Internet. I bet that at that number change between the time you said it and the time that people heard it. I'm absolutely sure. I mean, and to be fair,

a lot of those are corporate. I mean, we ourselves have a couple of corporate WordPress sites. Yeah yeah, yeah, and uh and so I mean it's clearly really revolutionize this whole process. And then you have other tools out there too, like Pinterest, which isn't really a blogging platform blogging. Yeah, you know, it allows you to post new things and

to comment on other people's posts kind of sort. It's it's mostly um kind of mean sharing the limit and I think that you know, I don't know, it's it's the state of blogging is very very short these days, and you know, people want to be able to do things very quickly and to consume things very quickly. I think. So you do have some pretty big sites that have, uh that are a cross between a blog and say an online magazine, so that they're updating more frequently than

a magazine. Would you know, traditional magazine. You think of it coming out on a monthly mon flee basis something like that. But then you've got websites out there that have really flashy uh interfaces and design, and so they kind of give you that magazine field, but they're updating on a daily basis, multiple times a day. So I'm thinking of things like the Verge, which is an example I use all the time. But it's because I genuinely

go to that site a lot. It's very it's very well done, and and so you know, it has elements of blogging in it. I wouldn't call everyone they're you know, uh, just a straight up blogger. Some of them, you know, maybe the term journalist is more relevant. I mean. And

here's another interesting thing I found about blogging. A lot of the people who responded to the surveys and technicraty identified themselves as being uh people who had worked in traditional media at some point, um like professional full time bloggers, and half of all corporate bloggers said that they had worked for a monthly magazine in the past. So slightly more than half of these professionals at some point or

another traditional journalism. Some of them might have been also, we're blogging at the same time as working at them. But yeah, it's done a big surprise because the public publishing world has gone through such tumultuous uh issues in

the past few years. We've seen publication houses closed down, We've seen companies really downsize, so those people in the downfall of print and and even yes, the great paper revolution of twenty oh nine and I made up um yeah, no, but no, there really has been a lot of of uh, you know, turnaround because we've seen a lot of layoffs

things like that. So um, journalists, many journalists have turned to the blogging world because I mean, that's that's where their skill set is, and this provides them the opportunity to continue the work that they've trained for and that they love. Yeah, and and they still want to mean people do still write and consume long form. I mean I always tag them long reads with with a tiny bit of ironic eyebrow involved when I when I post links like this on Twitter. But you know, it's it's

as as busy as everybody is. I think that there is always going to be room for for a little bit of that of that good old blogging style. I agree, and uh, you know, it's it's about once a year. I think back in two thousand eleven, it was inc five hundred reported that blogging had leveled off and was in decline among its its top companies. And you know this,

this sponded entire internet full of blogging is dead. OMG kind of kind of articles and buzz And I think that what really summarizes that is Mitch Joel of Twist Image suggested, is blogging dead or are useless blogs dying? Yeah? Yeah, there's still plenty of sites out there that I really consider blogs and they're doing quite well. And there's still a lot of people who are independently blogging, but I think they do get you know, people get weeded out. Like if you don't get a lot of visitors to

your blog, it could mean one of many things. It might just mean that your blog has low visibility, and it doesn't necessarily mean that you're a poor writer or anything like that. It just means that, you know, people are having a hard time finding your voice, or it could mean that you're not a great writer. I mean, it's it's something that's a possibility. It could be that you know, you're not striking a chord. And when I say you, I don't mean you, listener. I'm sure you

are an amazing la hopefully pathetically Yeah so. But yeah, And if you're wondering why we even brought this up, the reason why we brought it up is that, uh, one of the social platforms I'm on that I'm sure many of our listeners are on is linked In, and uh, every now and then, you know, LinkedIn gave you the ability to endorse people for certain skills. And I had received some responses about people endorsing me for different things, and I thought, you know, I hardly ever do that,

and I really should. I should pay it forward because I know a lot of these people, and I know what they're capable of. I should endorse them for the things I know that they do. I could not believe how many of my my links listed blogging as one of their skills. Like, like it was back when I made a resume, saying that you had a proficiency in

Microsoft Office was the thing. Today it looks like it's blogging. Wow, that you just I'm not sure if you've if you told me this before, about this, this genesis of this topic, I have forgotten it completely because this is actively blowing

my mind. Yeah, and it was just one of those things where as I was going down endorsing people for the stuff I knew, because I mean, I'm only going to endorse them for the stuff I know that they do, right, I Mean, my credibility is something I take very seriously, despite all despite all outward appearances. But yeah, I was I was going through and I'm just like, wow, I have never known this person. I mean, I'm sure they

have blogged, but I'm unfamiliar with their work. I didn't know that that was one of their like top five professional quality. Yeah, and and it was. It was repeatedly popping up, and I think it's almost became like the catch all, like better throw blogging in there. I mean, yeah, that's that's crazy to me. I mean, you know it certainly not begrudging anyone who does it, because a lot of people are way more serious about blogging than I am. I've always used it as a very personal, very hobbyist

kind of thing. Most of the time, I'm talking about things that are completely off color or ridiculous, or I'm just talking about OCTOPI I don't know, you know, it's nothing octopus. An octopus can change its color and shape and texture. That's very quickly, less than a second. You clearly have blogged about this. No, I was the same way like I was using until I worked for How Stuff Works. I would use blogs essentially to I have some ridiculous thought and I would have feel like a

compulsion to post it somewhere. So yeah, I honestly haven't gone back and visited. The other thing is that when I visited those old blog posts, I would read them and think, man, I used to be funny. I'm like that every five years, be five years, I can go back and look at what I did five years ago and think, Man, what happened? I used to be I used to be really good. Probably just I just don't

remember anything that I've written more than three days ago. Yeah, that's why I have to go back and reach it. It's like a goldfish. I'm like, oh man, this is great, oh man, this is great. Well, we think blogging is great. We There are a lot of blogs that I visit on a regular basis, and whenever I discover a new one, I'm always excited. There's a couple of regional ones that I go to all the time here in Atlanta because it's a great way of keeping up with news about

various communities and when that Mexican restaurant's finally gonna open. Um. It's a topic that we're really interested in. But if you guys have any topics you think that we should cover, I highly recommend you get in touch with us. Our email address is tex Stuff at Discovery dot com, or you can get in touch with us on Twitter or Facebook or a handle. There is text up hs W and Lauren and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics.

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