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!

People who arrived at this page were looking for:

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!

People who arrived at this page were looking for:

Bert & Ernie

While bugs are drawn to lights, I was drawn back to this blog when I saw that picture on Google. While the bug phenomenon can be explained scientifically, I do not think that I can explain what that picture has got to do with my blogging… Nevertheless, here I am and Bert & Ernie still remain as puppets I love to watch and Happy 40^th Anniversary to Sesame Street!

Addicted

Smokers find it hard to quit. Bloggers are no different. There are times when I felt like not wanting to put these alphabets into words on this space ever again but when other things faded away, the craving was just too much to bear and the words start to form again and one more story enters the blogosphere…

The Other Things

What dragged me out? At first it was just work. A new job, a new place, new people, new this and new that. It took time to settle down. Apart from that, I was just plain lazy as plain as a vanilla ice-cream can be… Plain but tasty… If you like vanilla like I do…

Then Came the Dragons

I do not work 24 hour a day and that is a fact. I do have some times after work but instead of cooking up another entry, I was busy hunting dragons and whacking some people online. The culprit was Legend – Legacy Of The Dragons. An online multi-player game. I killed and got killed and months passed by before I got bored of the same apparel that my online warrior was wearing… The thing is, that guy looked nothing like me at all… He had six pack abs and I have… Well, just think of any number other than 6… I finally left…

Facebook was Complaining

I left my Facebook for sometime and it started to whine… By the time I got back in, things have changed. New look, new layout, new this and that… Guess what? It started to look nice again like an old car with a new coat of paint and lots of refurbished stuffs in and out. I decided to stay and resume my connections to real people instead of some dragons and avatars wearing the same stuffs with different colors and accessories…

The Came the Mafias, Cows and Rollercoasters

What else can you do on Facebook besides telling the world how you are today, what new car  you bought, which neighbour’s cat you kidnapped and so on and so forth? The answer is, a lot more. I got sucked into the Mafia ring and I was making headlines there. At night I would be with my mafia brothers and sisters and during the day, to cover things up, I became a farmer at Farmville… After milking some cows and selling some fruits and crops, I started a theme park and life goes on… What’s next? I moved on…

Fallout 2

Thanks to Rapidshare, I found an old game that I used to play decades ago. It was, in my honest opinion, one of the greatest computer games ever created back then. Back then, I had a PC that could barely run the game and after a while, the PC put up a white flag and I just had to stop. Now, I could start all over again roaming the post nuclear world… One of the nice things about this game is the starting cut scene where it plays the song “A kiss to build a dream on” sang by Louis Armstrong… A lovely song…

Give me a kiss to build a dream on

And my imagination would thrive upon that kiss

Sweetheart, I ask no more than this

A kiss to build a dream on

The Earth is Round

And so is the cyberspace… I moved out of the blogosphere into some other places in the cyberspace and after a while, I am back to where I started… I have made one round and I guess I would be doing that over and over again… Only the dead remain at the same place…

The End