Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter - NYTimes.com

Not startling news, perhaps, but an interesting synthesis.

1) The 17-35 set is doing short-form social media and link-sharing rather than blogs.

2) The over-35s are sticking with blogging.

3) Blogging analysts say blogging is as strong as ever — witness the success of WordPress and Tumblr — it's just switching to new platforms.

“If you’re looking for substantive conversation, you turn to blogs,” Ms. Camahort Page said. “You aren’t going to find it on Facebook, and you aren’t going to find it in 140 characters on Twitter.”

Lee Rainie, director of the Internet and American Life Project, says that blogging is not so much dying as shifting with the times. Entrepreneurs have taken some of the features popularized by blogging and weaved them into other kinds of services…

The blurring of lines is readily apparent among users of Tumblr. Although Tumblr calls itself a blogging service, many of its users are unaware of the description and do not consider themselves bloggers — raising the possibility that the decline in blogging by the younger generation is merely a semantic issue.

4) Communities/affiliation may be key to the blogging concept going forward.

LiveJournal, another blogging service, has decided to emphasize communities. Connecting people who share an interest in celebrity gossip, for instance, provides the social interaction that “classic” blogging lacks, said Sue Rosenstock, a spokeswoman for LiveJournal, which is owned by SUP, a Russian online media company. “Blogging can be a very lonely occupation; you write out into the abyss,” she said.