Latin Interactive World: Joe Kutchera: Did Twitter Kill the Blog Stars?

...The Story of an Abandoned Blog

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While doing research for my book – Latino Link – I ran into one of my old co-workers and friends by happenstance, Tamara de Anda, during a trip to Mexico.

She is one of my favorite bloggers/tweeters in Spanish who writes by the name Plaqueta.” Her blogging style reminds me of Seinfeld in that she writes about “nothing,” or really everyday life in Mexico City – the places she goes, her conversations with taxi drivers, and the stuff that she buys in the markets. “It’s very urban. Mexico City is there implicitly in every word. The humor is what makes my blog what it is: no matter what I write about, it’s always with a humorous point of view,” says Plaqueta. Her blogger-powered site has seen highs of 60,000 visitors a month, 80,000 page views, and 400-plus comments. Now that she focuses on Twitter and posts much less, it has fallen to about 20,000 visitors. You can see some of her great photos of the Mission neighborhood in San Francisco here in her last blog post from March 29, 2010.

Because of her forthright, humorous writing style she has become a blog star and celebrity of sorts. In 2009, Plaqueta wrote a post about her eternal frustration of not being skinny. Many women were touched by that post to such a degree that Marie Claire Mexico published an interview with her. “People like the stories where I talk about my frustrations with love and my inferiority complex, because I’m very open and honest, but in the end I’m optimistic and I laugh at myself. People like to laugh, so some of my silliest posts, with stupid pictures I take in the streets, are the most successful,” says Plaqueta. She says her success boils down to authenticity, honesty, and personality.

During the blog boom in 2004, she read many blogs, around 20, plus all of those that she discovered by accident. “Now I will admit that I read a couple of blogs for information, like Alt1040 or BoingBoing, for example, and that most personal blogs I used to love are like mine, somehow abandoned. As people say today, ‘Twitter killed the blog star.’” Today, her most recent comments come from her readers, asking her to write new posts. What do you think? Has Twitter killed the blog celebrities? Or will the Plaquetas of the world return to blogging?

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