Cornell Blogs: The Next Generation

A year ago, Chronicle Online posted a story about the Life on the Hill project. In addition to highlighting the new University-sponsored student blogs, the article provided a comprehensive list of all Cornell blogs. Now that a year has passed, let’s revisit these blogs to see how they are doing now.

Student blogging project
– Alex Payne ’09
– Ben Crovella ’07: inactive
– Caroline Dias ’08
– Jennifer Lin ’09
– Jenna Bromberg ’08
– Nikki Gusz ’08

Other student blogs
– Charlotte Acharya, Grad: almost exclusively baby pictures
– Elliott Back ’06: no more breaking Cornell news
– Christian Montoya ’07: inactive, old content gone
– Stephen Miller: inactive, old content gone
– Erica Mallare ’08: inactive
– Shane Murphy, Grad: old content gone, farewell note remains
– Claudia Rodriguez ’08: now a wedding blog
– Dean Strelau: inactive, old content gone
– Center for Jewish Living student residence: inactive
– President of Facebook: Cornell-related posts are just follow-ups
– AdmitSpit — Polina Minkin ’10 contributes to this nationwide group blog on admissions and academics: inactive

Semi-anonymous freshman blogs
– Bungee Jump: inactive
– Cornell Days: inactive
– Karma Moths: one post in the last two months
– Wasting Forty Grand: inactive

General Cornell blogs
– Overheard at Cornell: two posts in the last two months
– Livejournal message boards http://community.livejournal.com/cornell/ and http://community.livejournal.com/cornell_u/: not exactly blogs to begin with
– MetaEzra — a group blog by Matthew Nagowski ’05, Andy Guess ’05 and Marc Zawel ’04: slowly becoming less Cornell-related

Ivy League-wide blogs
– IvyGate: pumping out multiple posts on most days
– IvyLeak: inactive, old content gone

Although some of these remain active, most aren’t, especially when accounting for the Life on the Hill blogs which are expected to meet a certain quota. According to BusinessWeek, “after 3 months on average, most bloggers realize that writing about their politics, launch haunts, or co-workers isn’t for them”. That makes sense based on what we see above. However, the same post says “we’re still seeing growth in the blogosphere”. It appears the same cannot be said for the Cornell blogosphere.

There have been virtually no new players during the last year. There are three new Life on the Hill blogs: Alex Cain ’10, Matt Hintsa ’10, and Joe McCourt ’10. Cornell Abroad came out with its own version called Voices from Cornell Abroad, a group blog by three students studying overseas. Engineering Admissions has several blogs as well (why they are hosted on Blogger is beyond me).

So far, all of these are Cornell-sponsored endeavors. As far as independent blogs go, the offering are slim. OTR, a network of college-oriented blogs, launched Cornell OTR. Despite high activity last summer, there hasn’t been a post in the last month. There is also CornellNewsWatch, but that is news aggregator rather than a blog. It does provide additional exposure to the few remaining Cornell blogs in an easy-to-digest format, so it deserves a mention for that.

Are these the last days of blogging at Cornell? They very well could be.