Blogging In The Age Of Social Media

The blog has been far less active the last several months. This has largely been due to the effects of social media on the blogosphere. Social media has made blogs near obsolete, and has cut tremendously into traffic.  The days are long gone with a small blog like this can regularly draw in traffic exceeding 10,000 viewers, and will probably never return.

For a while social media and blogs could be used together, using Facebook to drive blog traffic to make up for some of the lost viewers. However, thanks to Russiagate-inspired censorship of social media, a Facebook post with a link to a blog post will receive far less viewership on Facebook, leading to a situation where I now get more readers by posting brief items on Facebook as opposed to longer material on the blog. Therefore, as a combination of these realities, and being busy on other matters, I have been using Facebook far more for politics the last several months.

The nature of many of the political disputes of the last few months have also had an impact. Blog posts opposing Trump receive very little attention simply because there is an abundance of anti-Trump material in the mainstream as well as other blogs. Blogs are of greatest value in discussing topics which receive too little attention from the mainstream media.

As we enter the primary battles, this could change. The mainstream media concentrates on the horse race as opposed to the issues, and there will be far more to discuss in comparing the candidates. Blog posts also provide greater ability to utilize longer posts and include multiple links.

I recently thought to try doing matters backwards–instead of posting blog posts on Facebook, primarily posting the links and short comments from Facebook here on the blog, using Facebook’s embed feature. This also enables readers to click through to see the discussions on Facebook. I tried this in the previous post, starting to use a quick blurb as a post, and then proceeded to add some brief additional material.

I am going proceed to add some links back to some other recent Facebook items which remain relevant, and in the future probably continue with a combination of such links as well as posts which are preferable originating on a blog.

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