Is Blogging Over?

I think I may be asking this question a few years to late. Facebook and micro-blogging site Tumblr have all but taken over conventional blogging. A number of my favorite blogs have closed up shop in the last year: FWD/Feminist with Disabilities,, I Fry Mine in Butter, and Shapely Prose . Many more have all but been abandoned, or moved on to Tumblr.

Now don't get me wrong, I love my Tumblr . Mico-blogging is the lazy woman's publishing, but it can also work as a more traditional blog. Mind blowing, I know, but some people actually write on their Tumblrs. The instant community that's a huge part of the appeal is something you just can't get with a stand-alone blog. (The downside is that if you aren't pumping out content daily, you're kind of invisible.) And while I have no doubt  that the activist community formed though a network of like-minded Tumblr blogs is no less powerful than, and often overlaps with, the conventional social justice blogosphere, the truth is, for all the good I think micro-blogging has to offer, it feels a little too much like cheating.

I'm not exactly Tumblr's target audience: I'm old. And yet, I spend a good part of my day there, almost to the point that I dread writing here, on my primary blog. When did that happen? I don't want to think that a few pithy lines with a gif of a cat playing the piano is the most I can muster during the half-hour or so I set aside to, you know, write, but I'm beginning to notice the longer I blog on Tumblr, the pithier my "real" writing gets.

I think I've earned the right to call myself an old-school blogger. I seen various services come and go. I've been doing this long enough to remember the days when if you wanted to add a link log to your sidebar -- or a sidebar in general -- you had to crack open the HTML file to do so. (We also had to walk home barefoot in the snow to check our stats.) I tell people I  started blogging to hone my design skills, but really I wanted an excuse to write. Writing seemed like such a decadent art. Special people, smart people, write. Having a platform to publish my writing, no matter how small, was something I could have never imagined in the pre-internet days. I don't want to waste it on cat gifs.