To confirm my suspicion about lack of blogging, I took some time to compile some stats on the roughly 450 normal non-celebrity human beings who follow on twitter. I counted all the people I follow how list a blog in their bio or within 1-click of the link in their bio (to account for “about me” landing pages).
I found that only 93% had a functioning blog attached to their account. Of those 93, only 42 had published one or more blog posts in 2018. 55% of the real humans I follow have abandoned blogging. A small handful of the blogs I looked at had not even been updated in the past 5 years (why you would even bother linking this to your bio is beyond me).
Here’s the really interesting thing though…
I had never read a post by nearly any of those 42 active bloggers I identified. I simply wasn’t aware they existed.
Blogging has always suffered from discoverability issues. Discoverability is hard without a centralized platform like Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress.com, etc. But I think it’s a solvable problem.
We need blogging…
I’m sure many more smarter people have shared their thoughts on the importance of blogging.
Very simply put, decentralized, self-published content, free of corporate or advertiser control, is kinda sorta the dream of the internet.
In 2018, it’s easier than ever.