Read an interesting article titled Growing shift from blogs by Verne G. Kopytoff in NST dated February, 28 2011. The gist of the article was about the waning interest in blogging by the younger generations who prefer social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to blogs. Do you think that blogging is at its ending? For me, I just don’t think so..
Blogging started about 10 years ago by services, such as Blogger and LiveJournal, became so popular that Merriam-Webster declared “blog” as the word of the year in 2004. I remembered that.. Now, blogs are being challenged by Facebook with its all-purpose hub for posting anything under the Sun and Twitter that becomes part of the so called microblogging services, which allows messages of no longer than 140 characters..
Let me share some quotes from the article that would be of interest to bloggers..
According to Elisa Camahort Page, a co-founder of BlogHer, “If you’re looking for substantive conversation, you turn to blogs. You aren’t going to find it on Facebook, and you aren’t going to find it in 140 characters on Twitter.”
“The act of telling your story and sharing part of your life with somebody is alive and well — even more so than at the dawn of blogging. It’s just morphing onto other platforms.”, said Lee Rainie, director of the Internet and American Life Project.
How is Blogger, owned by Google, doing? It had a 2% decline, to 58.6 million unique visitors in the United States in December 2010 compared to a year earlier. However, globally, its unique visitors rose 9%, to 323 million. Have you ever wondered what would happen if Google decides to shutdown Blogger?
On the other hand,WordPress and Tumblr, which also calls itself a blogging service, seem to have avoided any decline. Isn’t that interesting? According to Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic, the company that commercializes WordPress blogging software, bloggers often use Facebook and Twitter to promote their blog posts to a wider audience thus making them complimentary rather than competitors. He also mentioned that WordPress is mostly for serious bloggers, not the younger novices who are defecting to social networking.
“There is a lot of fragmentation. But at this point, anyone who is taking blogging seriously — they’re using several mediums to get a large amount of their traffic.”, said Schneider.
Looks like blogging will still be around for a long time folks!
Malaysia advanced to the second qualifying round of the 2012 London Olympic Games Under-23 football competition with a 2-0 aggregate. I didn’t see the game between Malaysia and Pakistan as the live telecast was cancelled right before the game started. No reason was given.
My suspect was that the football stadium in Lahore ran out of power extension cables thus unable to power up all the required equipments in order to provide live telecast to Malaysia.. Any other reasons that you can think of?
So, this post would be based on what I heard and what I read in Facebook and the local news. Thanks to Facebook, I got to know the final status of the game that ended up with a draw where no goal was scored. A draw that was enough to put the Harimau Muda to the second round of the Olympic qualifiers.
The draw was expected as the coach had decided on a defensive line-up right before the start of the game. However, I was told that the forwards (now confirmed to be somewhat toothless) failed to put the ball into the net at least 3 times. We just can hope that coach Ong Kim Swee have already worked on something to ensure better finishing from his strikers.
So, what happened to “the best defense is a good offense?”
Anyway, final score Malaysia 0 Pakistan 0. Congratulations to the young Malaysian football team! Hope they can keep the momentum up for the next round. It’s going to be a much tougher round!
Oscar and iPad 2. Two words that came to my mind while I was having shower at 11:30 at night. Don’t ask why I took my shower late at night.. So, back to the subject. The common thing about the two is that they both make me feel somewhat left behind.. Why is that so? Read on and you will know why and it might apply to you as well..
The 83rd Annual Academy Awards that was held recently gave oscars to many films that I have only heard of and never wanted or have any interest to watch. Take the Best Picture for example. The movie The King’s Speech won it. I have seen this title many times and yet it has never occurred to me that I should be finding out what it is all about, let alone watching it.. I have never even heard of Colin Firth before this.. Well, now I know that he is the leading star in The King’s Speech.
Looking further down the list of winners, there are Christian Bale and Natalie Portman. Although their names are familiar, I could not say the same about the movies, The Fighter and Black Swan. What do you expect when the last English movie that I watched was Shaun the Sheep: Spring Shenanigans? At least I had a good laughed. So did Pasha..
And now, what about iPad 2? I am sure that many of you are aware that iPad 2 is now available.. From time to time, I have to deal with people who claim to be are part of the so called corporate world. These people, nowadays, carry BlackBerry as their office phone and iPhone as their personal phone. On some occasions, iPad has started to replace notebook (referring to either the paper version or the computer version).
So, I am only matching them with my low end Android phone. The only consolation that I have is the fact that while they are touching theirs, I am touching mine. Hip Hip Hooray to the touch screen!
Back to iPad 2. I would love to have one and I am sure if Pasha has perfected his demanding skill, he would have asked me to buy one for him. At his age, he can already appreciate the different kind of excitements when using an iPad, an iPhone or my low end Android phone. Luckily, as of now, he seems to understand that I just can’t afford to get an iPad 2 or even an iPad for that matter..
There you go. Two things that make me feel left behind. But, while people are harping about the latest movies in town, I am totally happy watching what I want to watch and while the corporate world is happy with its gadgets, I am happy with mine in my karipap world.
So, it is pretty okay to feel left behind for as long as I am pretty in touch with my realities..
P/s:
Not all post have to make sense. It is not what you read but how you read it..
Cik Peah
zik
Anyyss Shuhaimi
terbelog
Khidhir
