Tag blogging

Still blogging? FYI: It’s old news

BY TIM BARKER
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH – 02/28/2010

There was a time when Sarah Truckey had a close relationship with her blog. The St. Louis-based freelance writer visited it every couple of days, sharing stories and thoughts with anyone willing to read them.

But today, the intervals between visits are growing longer as Truckey, 25, increasingly turns to social networking site Twitter to talk to the world. She likes the way Twitter limits entries to 140 characters, forcing her to keep those missives short.

“The blog posts wouldn’t necessarily get me in trouble. But I would end up revealing more than I should,” Truckey said.

While not ready to abandon the blog altogether, Truckey does represent a growing trend in the world of blogging. Young people just aren’t as interested in them as they once were. And it’s yet another example of the way rapid changes in technology — and the way we use it — can transform you from trendy to dinosaur seemingly overnight.

MySpace? Out. Facebook? In. Using a cell phone for phone calls? Out. Using it to send a text message? In. E-mail? Outside of scammers and spammers, does anyone use it?

OK, there’s a bit of hyperbole there. But it’s clear we live in a world where our ways of communicating are changing so fast that it’s virtually impossible, particularly for older adults, to stay current.

And certainly there are times when keeping up can be critical. As the parent of virtually every cell phone-toting teenager or young adult knows, you learn to text if you want to keep in touch.

Still, there’s no reason to obsess over every new communication development, said Dean Terry, director of emerging media at the University of Texas at Dallas. Some basic familiarity with social networking and texting may be all you need to get by. It’s not as if the old ways will just die out.

“Don’t beat yourself up if you can’t keep up with everything,” Terry said. “We still have radio. We still have plays. And we still have novels.”

In so many ways, it is the nation’s army of teenagers and young adults that’s deciding for the rest of us what’s cool and what’s not. Those decisions can, and often do, change quite quickly.
“Adults are always playing catch-up. And unfortunately, when we get there, (teens) may have already moved on,” said Gary Rudman, a California-based market researcher who specializes in teens.

Just look at what’s happened to blogging, an area that’s still growing in popularity with older Americans, just as it’s losing steam with the younger set.

The percentage of older adults — those over the age of 29 — who say they maintain a blog has increased from 7 percent to 11 percent since December 2007, according to a recent report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Meanwhile the ranks of bloggers in the 18-29 age group fell from 24 percent to 15 percent during the same time frame.

The drop has been even greater among teen bloggers. In 2006, 28 percent of online teens said they blogged. Only 14 percent say the same thing today, according to Pew.

Social networking experts cite some pretty simple reasons for the decline of young bloggers.

Some suggest that it’s tied, at least partly, to the decline in popularity of My- Space, the one-time king of social networking. In recent years, social networkers have made a decided shift to Facebook, which puts more emphasis on short status updates and less emphasis on blogging.

“Because of what each site offers, that really changes what people do,” said Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist with Pew.

Others say blogging simply doesn’t match well with the preferred communication style of young people, who like quick exchanges via text message and Facebook status updates. Some even suggest that young people might have skipped blogs altogether if they had arrived at the same time texting was taking off. Many young people just don’t have time in their lives for blogs.

“We used to think of blogs as short little blips of commentary. But now they seem very long,” said Terry, from the University of Texas. “If you are updating your Facebook or Twitter all day, then in some ways you’ve gotten it all out. You’ve said everything you wanted to say.”

Some attribute the decline of blogging and MySpace — and anything else being abandoned by young people — to the desire of teens and young adults trying to carve out their own space.

Rarely are they happy to see that space infiltrated by parents and grandparents.

“As soon as it becomes too popular, they want to move on to something else,” said Kathryn Montgomery, a professor of communication at American University in Washington.

Not everyone buys that.

“That’s been the routine theory about why MySpace lost ground to Facebook,” said Steve Jones, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “But I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. A lot of adults are using Facebook now. And I don’t see younger people leaving in droves.”

And really, it’s not necessarily the end of the world even if the youngsters do run off to greener pastures.

Rebecca Hanes, 36, of St. Louis, has been blogging for five years. She actually has a pair of blogs, including one she describes as “a big ol’ bowl of soup” in terms of content.

Hanes shrugged off the news that young bloggers have been dropping left and right. She says she has no plans to abandon her own little slice of cyberspace: “As far as I’m concerned, it’s probably something I’ll always have.”

Young workers push employers for wider Web access

By MARTHA IRVINE – July 12, 2009

CHICAGO (AP) — Ryan Tracy thought he’d entered the Dark Ages when he graduated college and arrived in the working world.
His employer blocked access to Facebook, Gmail and other popular Internet sites. He had no wireless access for his laptop and often ran to a nearby cafe on work time so he could use its Wi-Fi connection to send large files.

Sure, the barriers did what his employer intended: They stopped him and his colleagues from using work time to goof around online. But Tracy says the rules also got in the way of legitimate work he needed to do as a scientific analyst for a health care services company.

“It was a constant battle between the people that saw technology as an advantage, and those that saw it as a hindrance,” says the 27-year-old Chicagoan, who now works for a different company.

He was sure there had to be a better way. It’s a common complaint from young people who join the work force with the expectation that their bosses will embrace technology as much as they do. Then some discover that sites they’re supposed to be researching for work are blocked. Or they can’t take a little down time to read a news story online or check their personal e-mail or social networking accounts. In some cases, they end up using their own Internet-enabled smart phones to get to blocked sites, either for work or fun.

So some are wondering: Could companies take a different approach, without compromising security or workplace efficiency, that allows at least some of the online access that younger employees particularly crave?

“It’s no different than spending too much time around the water cooler or making too many personal phone calls. Do you take those away? No,” says Gary Rudman, president of GTR Consulting, a market research firm that tracks the habits of young people. “These two worlds will continue to collide until there’s a mutual understanding that performance, not Internet usage, is what really matters.”

This is, after all, a generation of young people known for what University of Toronto sociologist Barry Wellman calls “media multiplexity.” College students he has studied tell him how they sleep with their smart phones and, in some cases, consider their gadgets to be like a part of their bodies. They’re also less likely to fit the traditional 9-to-5 work mode and are willing to put in time after hours in exchange for flexibility, including online time.

So, Wellman and others argue, why not embrace that working style when possible, rather than fight it?

There is, of course, another side of the story — from employers who worry about everything from wasted time on the Internet to confidentiality breaches and liability for what their employees do online. Such concerns have to be taken especially seriously in such highly regulated fields as finance and health care, says Nancy Flynn, a corporate consultant who heads the Ohio-based ePolicy Institute.

From a survey Flynn did this year with the American Management Association, she believes nearly half of U.S. employers have a policy banning visits to personal social networking or video sharing sites during work hours. Many also ban personal text messaging during working days.

Flynn notes that the rising popularity of BlackBerrys, iPhones and other devices with Web access and messaging have made it much trickier to enforce what’s being done on work time, particularly on an employee’s personal phone. Or often the staff uses unapproved software applications to bypass the blocks.

As a result, more employers are experimenting with opening access.

That’s what Joe Dwyer decided to do when he started Chicago-based Brill Street & Co., a jobs site for young professionals. He lets his employees use social networking and has found that, while they might spend time chatting up their friends, sometimes they’re asking those same friends for advice for a work problem or looking for useful contacts.

“So what seems unproductive can be very productive,” Dwyer says.

Kraft Foods Inc. recently opened access to everything from YouTube to Facebook and Hotmail, with the caveat that personal use be reasonable and never interfere with job activities.

Broadening access does, of course, mean some employees will cross lines they aren’t supposed to.

Sapphire Technologies LP, an information-technology staffing firm based in Massachusetts, started allowing employees to use most Internet sites two years ago, because recruiters for the company were going on Facebook to find talent.
Martin Perry, the company’s chief information officer, says managers occasionally have to give employees a “slap on the wrist” for watching sports on streaming video or downloading movies on iTunes. And he says older managers sometimes raise eyebrows at their younger counterparts’ online judgment.

“If you saw some of the pictures that they’ve uploaded, even to our internal directory, you’d question the maturity,” Perry says.
It’s the price a company has to pay, he says, for attracting top young talent that’s willing to work at any hour. “Banning the Internet during work hours would be myopic on our part,” Perry says.

But that also means many companies are still figuring out their online policies and how to deal with the blurring lines between work and personal time — including social networking, even with the boss.

“I think over time, an open embrace of these tools can become like an awkward hug,” says Mary Madden, a senior research specialist at the Pew Internet & American Life Project. “It can get very messy.”

One option is for companies to allow access to certain sites but limit what employees can do there. For instance, Palo Alto Networks, a computer security company, recently helped a pharmaceutical company and a furniture maker open up social networking for some employees, but limited such options as file-sharing, largely so that sensitive information isn’t transferred, even accidentally.

“Wide-open Internet access is the risky approach,” says Chris King, Palo Alto Networks’ director of product marketing. However, “fully closed is increasingly untenable for cultural reasons and business reasons.”

Flynn, at the ePolicy Institute, says it’s important that employers have a clear online policy and then explain it. She believes not enough employers have conducted formal training on such matters as online liability and confidentiality.

Meantime, her advice to any employee is this: “Don’t start blogging. Don’t start tweeting. Don’t even start e-mailing until you read the company policy.”

Martha Irvine is an AP national writer. She can be reached at mirvine@ap.org or via http://myspace.com/irvineap