
Why the Kids Don't Blog and Grandma's on Facebook - davidchua
http://www.fastcompany.com/1710068/embargoed-till-1201-am-thursday-grandmas-on-facebook?partner=homepage_newsletter
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Locke1689
I think there are two ways to blog: altruistically or narcissistically. If
you're blogging altruistically you're blogging for others primarily and
yourself secondarily. If you're blogging narcissistically you're mostly
blogging for yourself.

Most of the great blogs that I visit are all done altruistically. They are
well maintained, post useful information, and very rarely waste my time. They
also require a huge amount of effort on the part of the blogger because they
really have to do work to gather and present interesting and useful
information for their readers.

What a lot of the press has referred to as blogging is "narcissistic." Instead
of coming up with interesting information and vetting it for their readers
they mostly just spew whatever thoughts they had that day onto the page. It
doesn't take a huge amount of effort, but the signal to noise ratio is also
very low.

With the rise of Facebook and Twitter, narcissistic blogging can happen more
in the sphere you want it (your friend group). Narcissistic bloggers are
usually doing it for attention and their friends' and acquaintances' attention
is more important than strangers'.

Altruistic bloggers, on the other hand, have useful information to present so
they want to present it to as large an audience as possible. While I think
we'll see more narcissistic bloggers moving to Facebook and Twitter in the
future, hopefully the altruistic bloggers will continue putting the time in
for the public.

~~~
rick_2047
This is strange, why are you all posing the narcissistic blogger as a negative
here? I usually write whatever comes to my mind on my blog and still get some
readership. I seriously don't get the problem you have with people like me.
Blogging mainly started as lifelogs of people which they published on the
internet, I believe that is what a narcissistic blogger does and nothing is
wrong with that.

~~~
Locke1689
That's a good point. I should imply a distinction between truly narcissistic
bloggers who are doing it to gain attention for themselves and bloggers who
are instead focused on themselves. They blog as a personal activity without
viewership in mind. I Perhaps I should write a blog post on all this and bring
it full circle.

~~~
rick_2047
I don't know of any people who blog just to get attention, but even if someone
did whats wrong with that?

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city41
I know I should blog, and I have a blog that gets updated about once every
three months. Blogging is really labor intensive. IMO making blogging truly
streamlined and easy has still not happened. Posterous's blogging by email was
a great attempt. I also liked a blog engine I ran into[1] that just pulled
Markdown formatted text files out of a git repository (it was powered by
Sinatra).

But regardless of the tools, truly quality blog posts take time and effort to
plan out, research and write. The end result is the vast majority of blogs are
nothing but noise (including my own).

One thing I am working on to fight this is getting my company to sanction a
company blog. Where I can dedicate some real time to a development blog. The
benefit being we can hopefully start attracting an audience, and gain a
foothold when we open source some of our bits. The real goal being finding new
developers when it's time to hire that much easier as we will hopefully be
seen as a quality company to work for. Almost the same reason individuals blog
and release stuff on github.

[1] <http://www.restafari.org/introducing-marley.html>

~~~
Alex3917
"But regardless of the tools, truly quality blog posts take time and effort to
plan out, research and write."

What's interesting is that the blog posts that are the most successful on HN
and other social news sites seem to be the ones that take around 8 hours to
write, plus or minus two. If one spends 30 hours writing a blog post then it's
generally as unsuccessful as if one spent only three hours writing it. There
are definitely exceptions, like I'd bet Fred Wilson writes most of his posts
in only a couple hours, but for the most part this rule seems to hold well.

~~~
jsomers
I'm curious: how do you know how long it takes writers of successful blog
posts on HN to write those posts?

Your number _feels_ right—I've written a number of "successful" HN posts
myself, and they've all taken about 6-10 hours to write—but I wouldn't want to
make the kind of statement you've made, that "for the most part this rule
seems to hold well," until I've seen lots and lots of data.

~~~
Alex3917
In addition to my own experience, Guy Kawasaki also said that his blog posts
took him about 8 hours to write on average. He's sort of the archetype because
originally every single one of his posts was approaching the platonic ideal,
and he made the technorati top 100 only a few months after starting his blog.

In general though it's not that hard to tell roughly how long a blog post took
to write just by reading it. The typical breakdown of a successful blog post
is usually something like:

1) Two or three hours of reading a few journal articles or digging up a bunch
of facts and citations from Google.

2) Two or three hours writing down what you want to say in roughly the order
you want to say it. The sweet spot is usually 800 to 1200 words.

3) Another two hours restructuring the writing so that your the voice, flow,
formatting, grammar, etc. maximally resonate with the people who you
ultimately want to upvote your post.

4) Another hour or two polishing the post, especially the first two or three
paragraphs so that you can maximize the amount of people who actually read
what you write once they click on the link. Also optimizing the title, coming
up with a snappy conclusion, making sure the whitespace is aesthetically
pleasing, etc.

5) Another hour to turn the post into HTML, make sure all the links are
working, fix HTML formatting issues, correct last minute typos, and go live.

If you spend longer than this doing research and coming up with more original
ideas then your posts will no longer resonate with as many people because even
though it's more insightful, it's less anchored to stuff they already know and
accept as true. And the only people who can really do a good job faster than
this are those who can get away with writing in the same voice they speak in,
which is very few people because most people aren't very good at speaking. So
generally only people like Seth Godin can do this and still get lots of
upvotes. Similarly, you can also shave off some time if you're someone who can
draw on vast amounts of professional experience in addition to research, like
Fred Wilson. But again there aren't that many people that can do this and
still be credible, because even if you're legitimately a well-recognized
expert it still only works for people in a handful of professions.

In general you will rarely see Paul Kedrosky's blog making the front page
here, because most of his blog posts are just a list of new statistics without
much explanation. And even though these are often brilliant and have the
potential to completely reshape your worldview, people apparently have trouble
understanding the implications without any further explanation. And similarly,
rarely do Salon.com or Edge.org articles make the front page; people have
trouble believing that Salon articles are true because there's a lot of
research they haven't heard before so they think that it must be false because
if it was true they would have already heard about it, and in the case of
Edge.org people don't like to think for themselves about whether or not the
vast amounts of original ideas are likely true.

------
kleiba
Interestingly little information in this article besides the headline.

~~~
lionhearted
The URL is interesting too, note the embargo notice -

[http://www.fastcompany.com/1710068/embargoed-till-1201-am-
th...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1710068/embargoed-till-1201-am-thursday-
grandmas-on-facebook?partner=homepage_newsletter)

~~~
scottkrager
Yeah, I dunno if it was just instinct, but that was the first thing I noticed.

Someone needs to learn pretty URLs...

------
alxp
I think we've ended the historical period where younger people will always be
more tech-savvy than their slightly older counterparts. I wonder if having
internet and ubiquitous connectedness just be a part of the background for
younger people will actually make them less likely to be early adopters of
something unknown or up-and-coming.

~~~
corin_
I don't think we can know if that's true or not.

Younger people have been more tech-savvy because they grew up with the
technology whereas the older generations had to learn stuff that wasn't around
when they were young.

Depending on how tech changes in the future, that could well be the case
again. We already know that in thirty years the industry will be SO different
to what it is now, will everything be a massive scaling up of what we already
know, or will new technology arrive that the new younger-generations will grow
up with while we'll be growing old shouting "I REMEMBER WHEN..." - only time
will tell.

------
cliffkuang
Funny how the internet is slowly transforming to just pointing and saying
"Wow!"

~~~
sp332
I was just thinking of this yesterday. It's as if there isn't any kind of
symbolism on the web. AFK, if I want to talk about apples, I can use the word
"apples" and people will know pretty much what I'm talking about. But on the
internet, if I want to talk about something, I'll just link to some other
webpage that says what I want to say. It's as if, every time I wanted to talk
about apples, I had to bring an apple to show people. Where did the meta go?

~~~
alexitosrv
I friend of mine wrote on that spot, but regarding rants. If your want to rant
on something its likely someone else already did
<http://devnull.li/~jerojasro/blog/posts/rule_no_36/>

------
boredguy8
I'm sorry: where's the "why"? All I see is "Data: kids don't blog..."

~~~
trotsky
the why is that the stats provider calls the same behavior two different words
- what they used to call blogging (livejournal) they now call social
networking (facebook)

------
thedoctor
Is Tumblr a blog? It's growing like crazy. OTH, Posterous growth as a blogging
platform seems to have peaked, which may explain their pivot to Groups, which
is a social networking and media sharing play, the heart of Facebook and
instagr.am.

------
dcaldwell
I think the reason that Grandmas have adopted technology at a faster pace is
that technology as a whole is becoming easier to use - probably due to a
stronger focus nowadays on UI/UX. As opposed to engineers being in charge of
design, we now have more real designers in charge of design - see what's
happened in spaces like email marketing with Mailchimp. Another obvious
example but in hardware is the iPad. Grandmas don't have to worry so much
about booting up, operating systems, etc. They just press a button and it
works.

I think kids don't blog as much because it's so much easier for them to get an
audience through their current social media networks - primarily Facebook.
Most blogs don't have huge audiences - mostly just friends and family. So, why
would someone create a separate blog and then try to drive traffic to that
blog when they can just post similar content on Facebook or Twitter and have
it served up to their friends and family? I'm sure they get way more comments
on their Facebook updates than they do on a blog anyway. Particularly for a
narcissistic blogger, that's what they're looking for anyway - affirmation.

~~~
jseliger
_I think kids don't blog as much because it's so much easier for them to get
an audience through their current social media networks_

I actually like this comment: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2012444>
(which you reference towards the end) on why kids use Facebook, which makes a
distinction between blogging altruistically and narcisstically. The former
means blogging chiefly for others and offering information they couldn't find
elsewhere, while the latter means blogging chiefly as a way of raising one's
own status.

I'm guessing most kids don't have enough knowledge of ways of structuring what
knowledge they do have to make of interest to others -- who they (mostly)
don't care about anyway.

------
dstein
We are becoming the borg. Teenagers don't blog because they don't have the
time, and are becoming incapable of thinking independently of their
collective. Information streams into their brain at a rate they are unable to
comprehend, and so their world is this ultra-fast blur of data, just basic
I/O, without any processing.

Oh, and stay off my lawn.

------
fluidcruft
Facebook is now more popular than LiveJournal and MySpace. News at 10.

------
J3L2404
Kids don't blog because most don't write in essay form and are trending
towards shorter form, shorter attention span communications.

Grandmas are signing up for FB in record numbers to see pictures of their
grandchildren, which they obsess over.

~~~
flogic
Well most people don't blog. We just don't have that much to say.

~~~
J3L2404
I hope that is not true. I think it is more a matter of organizing your
thoughts into something you deem presentable to an audience. Maybe the
Dunning-Krueger effect explains the generally low quality of many blogs -
Potentially high caliber bloggers are overly self-critical and don't publish,
for others the converse.

~~~
flogic
Maybe. There are a number of things I don't find original enough to be worthy
of a blog post or don't have enough data to feel comfortable saying. There are
a few rare things but they fall under the terms of the exclusive lease my
employer has on my brain.

