Am I a dinosaur?

You will find a few new links in my blogroll. The first new entries for some time. None of these are new blogs, just new to me. My feeling is there are very few new blogs on the block nowadays, and quite a few of my erstwhile favourites have drifted into neglect. To be fair I find I don’t visit them as much as I used to either. It is also noticeable that the hit stats of this blog are showing a slow but steady decline. (Two obvious reasons for this of course could be 1. my posting frequency has dropped off a bit recently and 2. I’m posting stuff nobody’s interested in!).

But it’s got me thinking lately - has the blogging golden age passed? Technology moves on apace, and fads come and go on the Internet as they do elsewhere. More so, even.

This blog was by no means a pioneer but it has been going for more than five years now. In terms of a presence on the web (at least inasmuch as an openly accessible url worldwide) that makes it older than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Spotify.

- The first tweet was twittered on the 21^st March 2006. That was longer ago than I thought but still makes Twitter 8 days younger than Feel It.  

- Although Facebook was launched on the US college circuit in 2004, it wasn’t opened to the public until September 2006.

- YouTube launched in beta in May 2005, but not officially until November 2006.

- Spotify had its beginnings in 2006, eventually being launched to the public in October 2008.  

I mention all these because they now consume a lot of peoples’ time when sat in front of their computer/laptop/netbook/iphone/android etc. Some of the time that probably used to be spent composing or reading blogs.

YouTube and Spotify in particular have made it easy to find and consume music on the Internet. I’m not a Spotify user but I certainly find I’m using YouTube more and more in my search for new (well, old mostly, in my case) music  (and audioblogs less). In fact it’s staggering how much obscure and old music you can find on YouTube nowadays; and a lot of the people posting their old record collections there might well have been running, and visiting, blogs if YouTube had not been available to them.

As for Facebook and Twitter (neither of which I have found the slightest inclination to use) I shudder to think of the amount of time spent on them updating statuses, friending, tweeting, looking at Izzy’s latest out of focus self picture taken at the pub up the road last night (which you saw being taken because you were there), blah, blah. To what end though I wonder? And by the way there is no time left after all that to actually read a blog (let alone a newspaper, or a magazine, or a book).                       

There you have it.

As I said all this has passed through my mind in the last few weeks.  Coincidentally, in the latest (July ’11) Word magazine there is an article that mulls over the same question of “where have all the bloggers gone?” and reaches some of same conclusions as me (although in a much more in depth and journalistically professional way, of course).    

 

So is the whole blogging malarkey now officially “old school”?

Am I a dinosaur?  

(The answer to the second question I know is yes, I keep playing 30+ year old music on vinyl for chrissakes!)

Sergio Mendes And The New Brasil ’77 – The Real Thing  1977


From this , a great little album I picked up this week for next to nothing.