Quo tendimus? #atozchallenge

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The team decided our theme for this month's posts here would be "2020 visions of blogging." This set of weekday posts focuses on:

Blogging Hopes And Dreams For The Future

Quo tendimus? Where are we going? Where will blogging be next year, five years from now, and further on?

I think you'll start seeing people leaving the traditonal blogging platforms and using social media to share their ideas instead. Twitter and Facebook (and the alternative social media platforms) are already being used as blogs by many users. Some have escaped the written word entirely, using YouTube to create vlogs, Soundcloud and Anchor to create podcasts. The advantages are many: the platforms are easier and more intuitive to use, it's easier for readers/viewers/listeners to leave comments, there isn't the concern about your theme being incompatible with mobile platforms, and so on. There are disadvantages as well: limitations on number of words, necessity of additional tools and production techniques, and so on.

One change that I hope to see is to move commenting and conversations away from the blog to social media. Doing that would solve one of the biggest problems we have: having a commenting system that was platform-independent. It's worth a thought, isn't it?

Those are my thoughts. What are yours?

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Oldie but goodie (#AtoZChallenge)

The team decided our theme for this month's posts here would be a take "2020 visions of blogging." This set of weekday posts focuses on:

Blogging Hopes and Dreams for the Future

I was once told "blogging is for old people." And that was about eight years ago (when I was in my mid-twenties, thank you). Technology ages, and it ages fast: Social media keeps reminding me that the generations growing up right now don't blog, and barely use Facebook or Twitter anymore. As someone who likes to keep up with technology, this has been bugging me for a while:

Is blogging getting Old?...

And then I realized I am asking the wrong question. The real question to ask is: Do I care? And if I care, why?

People use social media for a lot of reasons. Some of us do it for audience outreach and marketing. Some do it for community building. Many of us do it as a writing exercise, or to share written resources (in my case, folktales and book reviews). Some of these functions can be moved to newer platforms. Some can't (believe me, I tried sharing folktales on Instagram...). And that's okay.

I ask myself the question: Do I care? I like blogging. I enjoy writing posts, and publishing them, and sharing them on my social media. I enjoy reading the posts of other people. I enjoy reading text that is more than 240 characters long. Maybe it means I'm old. But if I actually grow old, and one day I will be sitting in my hover-chair and scrolling through blog posts on my holo-projector... well, I'll be Okay with that.

Maybe by then, blogging will be retro.

Have you tried moving blogging activities to other media? 

What are your thoughts on the matter?

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#AtoZchallenge The Future Of Modern Blogging

The team decided our theme for this month's posts here would be a take "2020 visions of blogging." This set of weekday posts focuses on:

Blogging Hopes and Dreams for the Future

Blogging Hopes and Dreams for the Future

Maybe modern blogs will be more focused on ads. I believe that people who blog about their passion will outlast any and every blog that is mainly "in it for the money." Search engines and algorithms aren't great at factoring passion... yet.

Here we have someone typing on a screen made of projected light. Maybe her blog is about her passion for robot meerkats, the pet of the future. And yeah, she probably has an affiliate link one can click to buy virtual treats for that pet. But will the company making the robot meerkat have a blog with regular content?

We're always more interested in the passions of people around us. We want to feel motivated by each other. So, yes, I'm excited for the technology side, but mostly I'm interested in a future of blogs filled with enthusiasm about whatever subject matters most to the blogger. And, hopefully, we'll still be around, doing a month-long blog hop to visit as many of those as possible.

ryrob.com/blogging-statistics Check that out for interesting blogging stats.

What technological advance related to blogging are you most looking forward to in the future?


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