Bear, Diah and Pasha

Is Blogging Dying?

Posted on the March 12th, 2011 under Blogging by Papa Bear

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!

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A Simple Widget for Your Blog

Posted on the December 9th, 2008 under Blog by Papa Bear

It is good to be back after a few days away due to the celebration of Aidil Adha recently. I have been receiving a few queries on how to put the link to my RSS feed using the widget at the bottom right of this blog page and therefore, I might as well share it with all of you who wants to have that as well.

Before I go on, please take note that I am not a programmer and therefore, my explanation would not go beyond my limited technical knowledge. Furthermore, I found this piece of code while hopping around from one blog to another and I could not remember where I learned this but this method was mentioned in a few blogs out there. So, blog hopping is not really a waste of time after all…

This method is the simplest that I have found so far. The other method that I learned was more complex and required that you have access to your hosting server. So, for the benefit of those who are not self hosted, I have decided to teach you this simple coding and it is what I am using too.

CAUTIONS: I am not responsible for any damage to your blog so do this after you have backed up your code and at your own risk!

Below is the code that you need to copy to your HTML file.

Loving My Firefox

Posted on the November 11th, 2008 under Blog by Papa Bear

I love Firefox not because many claim that it is the safest web browser in the world. To me, there is no such thing as safe surfing on the internet. It is just like there is no such thing as a car that is totally safe to drive. You just need to be careful and not do some stupid things while you are at it.

At the same time, many claim that Firefox is the fastest web browser in the world. There is some truth in that statement when running it side by side to the fat Internet Explorer from Microsoft. However, when it is timed against Google Chrome, that opinion might not really hold 100% as some sites are loaded faster on Chrome compared to Firefox.

So, if those are not the reason to fall in love and to be still in love with a fox that is on fire, what is it then?