Where have all the bloggers gone?

I remember a time not too long ago when every time something remotely interesting occurred in my life, I blogged it. A time when I spent the first hour or so of my morning reading and commenting on all my friends' blogs and catching up on more public (i.e., celebrity-related) blogs. But very few people blog anymore, and if they do, their entries are few and far between. The most active blogs are those with a purpose (like my friend Kimberly's Poor Girl Eats Well). People just aren't talking about their lives in blog form as much anymore.

Yesterday I was admonishing one of my friends (who used to write the most HILARIOUS blogs) because he hasn't blogged in more than a month. Then it occurred to me, I haven't been blogging so much either. I told myself my blogging urge had quieted because of MySpace's many recent glitches. I made this pretty blogger.com space to make up for that, and I've written all of three blogs on it since early February. I used to average three blogs A DAY.

So what's happened? The Internet has evolved. Now I spend the first hour or so of my day catching up on Facebook and Twitter. Everyone sends out pieces of their lives in snippets. The social networking site seems to have taken the place of the blog in many ways.

In some ways, that's cool. We're all growing busier by the minute. One may not have ten or twenty minutes to devote to writing a thought-out, carefully-worded essay on the state of their world. But it takes mere seconds to tweet, especially if you have a widget built right into your browser that lets you keep up with your friends' updates and post your own while you're doing other things. We still can keep up with each other, but more efficiently.

As the same time, you lose something. There's no way my friend Elise could pack one of her crazy stories into a Facebook status (so thankfully, she still blogs from time to time). You can only express so much in 140 characters or less.