Twitter is popular and so is Facebook. For many blogging is considered old, and many of the youth have moved off of blogs.

Interestingly enough, blogging is not one of them, as only half as many online teens blog compared to 2006, while users ages 18 to 33 also blog less than before. Blogging did see a slight uptick among older generations (ages 33 and up), but still accounts for a relatively small number of total users.

Overall, virtual worlds and blogging aren’t very popular in any age group, which probably indicates that tools such as Facebook and Twitter – which also enables users to express themselves online – have substituted blogging for many users. E-mail, on the other hand, has become nearly ubiquitous, even among adults ages 74 or over.

Being a platform is a hot topic, and Seth Godin makes a good point thinking of your job as a platform.

Where's your platform?

That needs to be the goal when you seek out a job.

Bob Dylan earned the right to make records, and instead of using it to create ever more commercial versions of his old stuff, he used it as a platform to do art.

A brilliant programmer finds a job in a small company and instead of seeing it as a grind, churning out what's asked, he uses it as a platform to hone his skills and to ship code that changes everything.

A waiter uses his job serving patrons as a platform for engagement, for building a reputation and for learning how to delight.

A blogger starts measuring pageviews and ends up racing to the bottom with nothing but scintillating gossip and pandering. Or, perhaps, she decides to use the blog as a platform to take herself and her readers somewhere they will be glad to go...

So, one way to think of a blog as a platform. Which is why I wouldn’t use Facebook or Twitter. When I blog at Typepad I own the content. I can take it somewhere else. I own the url www.greenm3.com which crosslinks to greenm3.typepad.com. I can take all of this and move the hosting of my blog to somewhere else.

Using Twitter and Facebook is easy for many, but is this how you want to run your platform?

If you create a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot, Blogger, etc, your platform to reach your audience can be shut down, and you have no way to bring yourself back up.

The same applies if you choose to blog on corporate blogs. The corporation can shut you down, remove all your posts, and when you leave all you wrote and the readers/subscribers are property of the corporation.

The best move Robert Scoble did was keep www.scobleizer.com when he was a Microsoft employee. All the traffic he gained became his IP and Microsoft did not have any ownership.

BTW, at some point I may get tired using TypePad and the blogging style which then means I can transform www.greenm3.com into the next thing.

GreenM3 is my platform to build new ideas. What is yours?