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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This entry applies to those who are using Twitter as a tool to do whatever it is that you do. If you are not using Twitter, you can skip the entry and go straight to the comment form and tell me that you do not use Twitter… 
… And if you are a celebrity using Twitter, this entry does not apply to you too…
Assuming that you are using Twitter to promote something, you would need to have lots of followers. In order to have many followers, you have to have something that attracts people to follow you or you can start following as many people as you can and hopefully some would then follow you back in return. The latter since to be a workable method to build up your followers despite that it is a time consuming effort.
But then, there is a problem to that method. Twitter impose a limit to the number of people that you can follow based on some caculated ratio that is only known to them. That means, if you only have 1 or 10 or 100 followers, you could only follow up to 2000 people. After that, the ratio kicks in and you must have some number of followers before you can follow 2001 people. This is mainly put in place to get rid of spammers and other undesirable people.
So, from time to time you would get people following you and some people, such as I, would then follow them back in the intention of having mutual benefits of following each other. Like anything else in this world, there would be some bad people who would follow you just to get you to follow them back so that they can increase their followers. Once you have followed them, they would them un-follow you so that they can start following someone else and increase their follower again. You would end up with less followers thus you are unable to add more people to follow… Bad eh!
What can you do? I think that there are many tools out there to help you manage this. My favorite is FriendorFollow. This is a site where you can check/do 3 things.
- People that you are following but they are not following you back
- People that are following you but you are not following them
- People that you are following and they are following you back
I make use of no. 1 and 2 a lot. No.1 is for me to remove those who have stopped following me. You don’t follow me, why should I follow you unless you have something that I really like.
No. 2 is used when I want to return the favor to those who take the trouble to follow me. But when they misbehaved, I would then use no.1 on them…
By using this, I can weed out any bad followers as easy as 1 2 3…
The service is Free! No registration required. Just key in your Twitter ID on the front page and then use the Following, Fans, and Friends Tabs accordingly. You must log on to your Twitter if you need to follow or unfollow someone. FriendorFollow is at http://friendorfollow.com/
Happy Twitting!
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Today I feel like sharing about my Twitter and what do I use it with. Twitter is one of those so called micro blogging tools and the only other similar thing out there is Plurk. I have seen Plurk with its fancy time line display stuffs but somehow I am still sticking to Twitter, which I find simpler and more straight forward. Furthermore, with the number of followers that I have right now, it would make it harder for me to move away from it.
Here are the tools or programs that I am currently using to complement my Twitter:
TwitterFox – I just need to see what are my friends and and the people I follow talk about and it would be not practical for me to log in to my Twitter account and refresh it all the time to see the latest tweet. With TwitterFox, an add-on to Firefox, this is done automatically and I have the option to reply as well as put in my own tweet. This is a must have for those who are following the tweets.
TweetLater – This is a powerful program that allows you to schedule your tweets, auto follow those who follow you and many more things. So far I only use this to auto follow those who follow me and send welcome and thank you message to my new follower.
Khidhir
Lauren
FiSh
