BlogHer - Email Is Over and Blogs Slow...Is Everyone Twittering? - Comments

Yep, Koan

Denise — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 08:35:09 -0600

But for now, that's not an option for me. Someday I'll move back to that - I hope.

No, it isn't dead for outbound - unfortunately. I can dream...

~Denise
BlogHer Community Manager

Fast Times @ Homeschool High & Flamingo House Happenings

You know you can get your Gmail email via RSS, right?

Koan — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 04:34:23 -0600

Run appropriate filters, and you can even get it delivered into different feeds.

For outbound messages, though, is email really dead?

I can't Twitter. I mean, I

Dana J. Tuszke — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 21:46:51 -0600

I can't Twitter. I mean, I can Twitter, but I don't do it often enough because frankly, I can't figure out how to work it. I pretend really well, but as far as responding to twitters and all that fancy schmancy stuff, I suck!

I hate email

Denise — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 15:00:25 -0600

Actually, hate is not a strong enough word. I want all of my information via RSS. Newsletters - RSS
Order updates - RSS
Calendar reminders - RSS
Children's holiday wish lists - RSS

My daughter messages me on myspace. My other daughter sends me text on my phone. My son, well he just comes over and talks to me.

I do not want email. If something, besides work stuff, comes to me by email I will probably just drop it in the trash without reading it.

Hate, hate, hate email. I wish it would die a much quicker death.

~Denise
BlogHer Community Manager

Fast Times @ Homeschool High & Flamingo House Happenings

I like my email...

Catherine Morgan — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 14:41:50 -0600

I agree with you. I like my email and I would hate to have to use text messaging and sites like facebook all the time. Why can't we just have both?

Contributing Editor Catherine Morgan
also at CatherineBlogs.com and The Political Voices of Women

The Fate of Email and Blogs

Mommy Bits — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 07:34:05 -0600

This will def. be an interesting sitiation to watch. I hope the world doesn't move to all text messaging and the use of Facebook, both of which I cannot stand to use. It's not that I'm too old to get it, Im only 31. I feel that if we head in this direction that the wrtten word will go down the toilet. I certainly hope the day never comes when I'm texting clients.

Gosh I sound old...

Link TextMommy Bits

Thanks for blogging about my post

alexiskold — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 17:51:45 -0600

Hey Marianne,

Thanks for your comment on my post. I agree with you, there is an interesting shift/competition that is taking place. Blogging is still vibrant and growing but as some other folks noted it is maturing too. Shorter forms of communication are taking over shorter blog posts. People who thought would make money, but do not, are going to stop blogging.

I am going to explore this topic more in the follow on posts on R/WW.

Thanks for reading and writing!

Alex

And Blogher ..

Beth Kanter — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 09:20:09 -0600

is at the Junior High level. My own blog is high school.

The level is not important, but the match with your audience.

Hitwise just published a chart that showed visits to social networking sites were more than email sites. And there was a recent businessweek article debate with Scoble - that email was dead, email isn't dead.

It may be dead, but people will still use. This will be the migration from the fax machine ten years ago - it will be a slow death ...

Facebook me

Kat Burb — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 06:50:02 -0600

I completely agree that email is getting less and less popular. I used to tell people to email me but now I say, "Facebook me". My email is now a desolate wasteland of SPAM. Everyday I have about 20-30 emails and they are all trash. These are the ones that escape by bug trap of a filter. I really enjoy using facebook because of the photo features and some of the interesting applications available. Although, those applications have even become bothersome.

Email Is Over and Blogs Slow...Is Everyone Twittering?

Marianne Richmond — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 10:44:27 -0600

Slate Magazine declared email dead today based upon the fact that kids use text messages and not email to communicate with each other. In my at home observations, sample size of 2, this is true. Email is used when my kids forget a paper that they wrote and need me to email it to them; never to communicate with each other. They use Facebook mail when a little privacy is necessary but otherwise use the Facebook wall. They complain about school, they make weekend plans and they document how it went, in words and in photos.

Taking a step on the wayback machine, it seemed for a moment in time that cheap long distance and cell phones killed writing causing worry that the art of writing would soon be extinct. Email actually saved the skill from becoming a DoDo Bird.Text messaging has kept the written word on life support, not because of lack of volume (I still can't fathom the sheer number of text messages my kids send in a day) but because of the secret code that substitutes for the English language...idk, sup, and so on.

Email just seems slow, not interactive enough to be a conversation replacement. IM and text are faster; more like a conversation in text. But email is for depth, elaboration, explanation, for attaching things to. And of course email is for spammers like Virginia is For Lovers.

Alex Iskold noted that he and Marshall had attended Blog World Expo along with 1500 other bloggers but upon his return home he wondered if blogging was just not all that anymore. He took a reasonably analytic look at blogging stats and concluded that it was in fact blogging as a trend is slowing down, it is rising compared with newspapers. He divided up bloggers by the reason that they blog:

Blogging for money, aka Professional Blogging

Blogging for business and pleasure

Blogging for a cause

Blogging for social reasons

Spam

He wrote that spam, social networks and microblogging might very well slow the growth of the blogosphere down as far as professional bloggers are concerned. I think I would have to agree. It seems (not a technical term) that people in the social media space are blogging less and using social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook more.

Today I was talking with Elizabeth Helfant who hangs out in a different blogosphere neighborhood and she noted that she was blogging less and it seemed that in her blogging word others were also blogging less. We also spoke of the abundance of information available online....that abundant overwhelming massive amount of information that unless aggregated and filtered becomes almost impossible to attend to.

Elizabeth has some really interesting things going on at MICDS which makes me especially happy since my son goes to school there. While exploring some of those things tonight, I learned the reading level of my blog is "highschool" by using the Blog Readability Test on Julie Lindsay's Blog. I guess that means that my kids could read my blog....except they would never want to be caught doing that.

Tags: Eizabeth Helfant, social networks, Facebook, Twitter, blogging, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Alex Iskold, Flat Classroom, : Media2.0, Particls, Slate Magazine