Right, that’s it. I’m going to come straight out and admit it: Twitter has killed blogging. Well, maybe not killed it but definitely wounded it.
You see, once upon a time (like, two to seven years ago) all the nerds on the Internets used blogs as a means by which to swap smart-arsed comments and pithy one-liners; good posts on good blogs were not just good posts in their own right but good conversation starters as well. Communities of like-minded (and some oppositionally-minded) people formed and gathered around their favourite blogs for discussion and larfs. Then along came the Facebooks and the Twitters (especially the Twitters) and all of a sudden those nerd communities that had come together thanks to blogs moved elsewhere to swap those comments and lines.
Now, in the future (like, 2010) there are still lots of awesome blogs and blog posts around but the awesome conversation tends to take place on the Twitters. Even if good blog posts are good conversation starters, the conversations decreasingly take place in the comment threads below the post.
But it’s not just the commenters whose behaviour has changed — the authors are doing things differently as well. I used to be a prolific blogger, averaging five to ten posts per week, but now I reckon I might punch out one a week if I’m lucky. True, I write for other non-blog outlets now, but the main reason is that when a thought comes into my head that would previously act as the seed for a blog post I now tweet it instead.
As much as I love Twitter and see the evolution of online interaction as an exciting thing, I do miss my blogging from both the perspective of the author and from the perspective of comment discussion participant. For this reason I am going to force myself to blog more, holding back tweetable thoughts and turning them instead into posts. I’m also going to get back into the habit of commenting on blog posts instead of taking my discussion to Twitter.
Who’s with me and who’s against me?