Ryan MacMillan

When i’m not writing blog posts for RMM I also present a radio show (Radiobox) at Warwick University (where its also been rumored I study…). However, my biography aside I turned up something interesting when preparing a feature (Best of the Blogs) for my show this week…

For those of you who don’t know (and I assume this will be nearly all of you) Warwick University has its own Blog-site: Warwick Blogs. The point of my feature is to highlight interesting, quirky and good blogs from this site. This week the site’s admin posted a blog showing the declining numbers of people blogging at Warwick.

3 years ago when Warwick Blogs launched they recorded 2,362 blogs. Today the figure stands at 800. Quite a drop! They cite 3 reasons for this - lack of advertising, the fact that blogs are no longer the new thing and of course Facebook. The omnipotence of Facebook (including as it does photos, notes - blogs by any other name - and all the other naff programs one can now attach to their profile) seems to be killing off the blog. However, i’d argue that whilst the number of blogs dropped significantly over 3 years, the number of posts has not dropped in proportion (only dropping by around 10,000 from 35.000 to 24,000).

Now, what I’d like to know is whether this trend is Warwick-specific or is this happening more widely? Is the wheat being separated from the chaff? Are other blog sites having less blogs but retaining a reasonably high post-rate by a more dedicated (dare I say better?) core? OR, is Facebook slowly taking over every online niche? In 5 years will blogspot, flickr et al be deader than a Dodo as social networking provides a more convergent solution?

Answers, as ever, on a postcard…