Although it often seems that the more things change the more they stay the same, the internet has been with us long enough now to have produced a trail of the dead all of it’s own. Remember firefly, geocities or boo.com? Possibly not. So what do you think will happen when blogs start losing their appeal because that’s what’s happening right now. True. There’s stats on this and everything [wearesocial.net]. I personally noticed the shift in Linefeed’s audience when Twitter became popular. At one point Linefeed (or rather your humble-ish author) had more Twitter followers than page views (although that’s no longer the case and Linefeed has a Twitter feed of it’s very own [@linefed] now).
A recent survey (I know what your thinking, ‘here we go’) [guardian.co.uk/media] suggested ‘young’ people aren’t so interested in blogs or
Twitter feeds or
Facebook (well there’s still loads into Facebook but they use it differently to us older folk) and no-one is interested in
MySpace because it’s shite. I don’t want to pry into the likes and dislikes of teenagers around the globe but part of me thinks it may have something to do with attention span. Not that teenagers have less of an attention span than fully grown adult type human beings (well, maybe a bit), it’s just that it’s possibly more a kin to an intensely focused beam of light. Settling for a short time before flitting off to the next byte of information, always self consciously aware of being talked at or talked down. Whereas us
older interweb users love reading online. We love swapping witty comments and sharing articles. We like to linger.
The problem here though is that the popular interweb as we know it, in terms of age and attitude, is a teenager. Us older types linger on sites that are constantly battling with the choice between stagnation and change. It’s a given that blogs stay relevant by changing as often as they can. Stop posting for while and your audience eventually dissipates. What’s happening now is that the blogging as a format has begun to share a similar fate, coming across as predictable and a bit stale.
It’s an odd thought that blogging itself could become an outmoded exercise. Once, both beacon of hope and scrounge of ‘proper’ journalism, blogging reached out from the internet and effected huge change in the way people consume mass media. Newspapers are still on the run from ‘citizen’ journalism, unsure whether to embrace or reject this intrusion into an age old arena. You get the feeling they are increasingly worried about the 140 word counts you need to get yourself noticed on Twitter these days though or how to distract the nattering masses using Facebook or whittle down their content to fit an iPhone app.
We here at Linefeed have been musing on the future of blogging for some time now and although we still feel it’s a valid and entertaining way to communicate with an audience of like minded individuals (and, indeed, friends – if you have read this far you are definitely a friend of Linefeed and thanks for stopping by), we can see the cracks appearing. That’s why you can now listen to our podcasts [linefeed/podcasts], watch our vids [vimeo.com/lineout] and buy our print-on-demand magazine [magcloud.com/lineread].
Finding new formats to disseminate our information is all part of the fun. One major change were making right here, right now is to shift our focus slightly back to print. Most of the articles appearing on Linefeed will now have been written for LineRead rather than the other way around. It’s a subtle shift but one we think will benefit both this here blog and our printed publication. Sounds a bit revisionist, I know, but there is the possibility that one day the internet itself will become passé, whereas print seem to endure and endure. Besides, things still just look better in print, don’t they?
So keeping all this in mind, we’re going to start a series entitled
‘Blogger’s Delight’ as a way to canonise those hard working bloggers who are keeping the flame burning and stoking the embers of popular (and no as popular) culture today by asking them the question
‘Why Blog?’. It going to take a little while to amass so stay tuned. In the meantime, the fine folk over at
Grafik magazine have started a series of interviews with graphic design orientated bloggers which is well worth catching up with
[grafikmag.com].
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When I landed back in Australia about 12 months ago I had an instant fascination in the vast array of hand painted signage dotted around town and set about photographing as much of it as possible. Those images then became the basis for a series of heavily manipulated graphic illustrations which have now found their way onto canvas. A set of 8 images are now available exclusively from Elwood Village Picture Framers in Melbourne, Australia. For details give em a call on +613 9525 7511. 
