‘We were all bloggers, or so it seemed circa 2003,” writes Jeet Heer:
“At the height of the blogging craze, there were even utopian claims made on its behalf: Blogging would give us (finally) the Republic of Letters that the Enlightenment promised, a world where everyone could be a writer and find an audience—an interconnected network where, in true McLuhanesque fashion, a divided world would become a unified global village. Thanks to blogs, journalist Trevor Butterworth wrote in the Financial Times in 2006, ‘power was shifting from the gatekeepers of the traditional media to a more open, fluid information society.’”
“A funeral for blogging itself feels not far off—or at least a mid-life crisis.”
This blog was viewed about 140,000 times in 2012 by readers from 188 countries. Those remaining 7 countries don’t know what they’re missing.
In 2012 there were 454 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 2,693 posts. Most were illustrated with mashups from our Flickr file.
The busiest day of the year was March 6th with 2,654 views. The most popular post that day was a typically hard-hitting think piece, “Oreo Cookie Centennial.” Best ever? 48,132 views of “Congress Reaps Pizza Harvest“ on November 17, 2011. Total views of NotionsCapital.com since August 2007: 1,122,131.
The Twitter microblogging empire decided to refresh its logo, and the selection was made on an exciting two-hour broadcast of NBC’s “America’s Got Tweets” (above). The winner: an updated version of Twitter’s Larry The Bird.
The U.S. military is determined to prevail on the cyber-psycho-cultural field of battle, winning hearts, minds, and Facebook friends with global information operations. In accordance with Pentagon planning document Joint Vision 2020 (Department of Defense, Joint Vision 2020 [aka DOD JV 2020], 2000), the U.S. military will not rest until it achieves information domain dominance with tactical tweets and barrages of blog posts. The Web has been weaponized, and social media militarized. Sign up now for a career in Information Operations (IO).
Mr. Morozov emphasizes that networked digital tools can be used to maintain political power as well as challenge it, and recently spoke to the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) about this. The video of his complete lecture is here, but this short animated excerpt is easier to follow and more fun:
“Blogs were once the outlet of choice for people who wanted to express themselves online. But with the rise of sites like Facebook and Twitter, they are losing their allure for many people — particularly the younger generation.
The Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center found that from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half; now 14 percent of children those ages who use the Internet have blogs. Among 18-to-33-year-olds, the project said in a report last year, blogging dropped two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier.”
–“Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter,” Verne G. Kopytoff,New York Times.
Related: “Social Media and Young Adults,” Amanda Lenhart, Kristen Purcell, Aaron Smith, and Kathryn Zickuhr, Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.
Image (“Anatomy of a Blogger, after Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers”) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
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