blog evolution

In developmental psychology, most models take you through various “life stages” in which, depending on the theory, different things happen.  For Freud, it was a matter of what or who you were attracted to sexually.  In Piaget’s model, our brains process information in different ways.  For Erikson, we faced various crisises during different stages of our lives.

And I’ve recently noticed that during various life stages, we use different blogging tools, pretty much in order.  Consider:

Stage 1:  livejournal or myspace.  You can use either of these up until you graduate.  While some people on these sites choose to use correct spelling, grammar, and complete sentences, it is by no means a requirement.  And, you have to be able to read text message language when looking at these sites, since much of it is written in “lol” or “OMG” or “SQUEE” or “2″ when you mean “to.”  Eventually, though, after you graduate college, you most definately have to leave live journal (I used to have 20 friends on there, and now I’m down to 2).  Myspace is a bit different, since most myspace users don’t really use the blog option.  In fact, most myspace blogs seem to last about 3 months, and have about 4 posts total.

Stage 2: Blogger.  Those who leave livejournal end up here.  And many even skip stage one and start here.  I, for example, was several years out of college before blogging caught on, so I skipped straight to this step.  I think the fact that you have to know HTML in order to post links on your blog weeds out most of the “lol”ers.  Which is good. 

Stage 3:  WordPress/Typepad:  For some reason, lately it seems that everyone is ditching blogger.  I think a few things happened.  One, they lost some people during the merger of people’s blogger and gmail accounts.  It didn’t go smoothly for a lot of people.  Other’s got bored.  I really like blogger, but after nearly 5 years, it was time for a change. 

And, I think that having “press” and “type” in the names just gives wordpress and typepad an aura of respectablity.  You just feel like you are an actual published author using one of those sites.  It’s where “serious” blogging happens.  For those of you still on blogger who take umbridge with that statement, just know this:  you’ll be here soon enough.  It’s just the natural course of human development.  It’s like going from Concrete Operational Thought to Formal Operational Thought (2 of Piaget’s stages, for those who didn’t take developmental psych).  It just happens. 

The exeption: Xanga.  I don’t know what it is about Xanga.  I don’t know what age group it appeals to.  I don’t know why people use it.  I don’t know why people continue to use it.  But, they tend to stick with it.  Perhaps they just like getting “eprops,” I couldn’t tell you.  And those who do leave, they just jump randomly to whatever site.  It’s an unpredictable bunch.  For the record, I hate Xanga.  But, the people who use it seem pretty cool.  So, there that is.

And finally, there’s Brent.  He just wrote his own blogging software.  He’s going to be a mad scientist some day.