Probably the single question I’m most often asked as I talk to people about Say Everything is: How has Twitter changed blogging? Twitter’s rapid growth — along with the preference of some users for sharing on Facebook and the rise of all sorts of other “microblogging” tools, from Tumblr and Posterous to Friendfeed and identi.ca — is altering the landscape. But I think the result is auspicious in the long run, both for Twitter-style communication and for good old traditional blogging. Here’s why.
If you look back to the roots of blogging you find that there has always been a divide between two styles: One is what I’ll call “substantial blogging” — posting longer thoughts, ideas, stories, in texts of at least a few paragraphs; the other is “Twitter-style” — briefer, blurtier posts, typically providing either what we now call “status updates” or recommended links. Some bloggers have always stuck to one form or another: Glenn Reynolds is the classic one-line blogger; Glenn Greenwald and Jay Rosen are both essay-writers par excellence. Other bloggers have struggled to balance their dedication to both styles: Just look at how Jason Kottke has, over the years, fiddled with how to present his longer posts and his linkblog: Together in parallel, interspersed in one stream, or on separate pages?
A historical footnote: Twitter’s CEO is Evan Williams, who was previously best known as the father of Blogger. You find a style of blogging that’s remarkably Twitter-like on the blogs that became the prototype for Blogger — a private weblog called “stuff” that was shared by Williams and Meg Hourihan at their company, Pyra, and a public blog of Pyra news called Pyralerts (here’s a random page from July 1999). The same style later showed up in many early Blogger blogs: brief posts, no headlines, lots of links — it’s all very familiar. In some ways, with Twitter, Williams has just reinvented the kind of blogging he was doing a decade ago.
Today, the single-line post and the linkblog aren’t dead, but certainly, much of the energy of the people who like to post that way is now going into Twitter. It’s convenient, it’s fun, it has the energy of a shiny novelty, and it has the allure of a social platform.
But there’s a nearly infinite universe of things you might wish to express that simply can’t fit into 140 characters. It’s not that the Twitter form forces triviality upon us; it’s possible to be creative and expressive within Twitter’s narrow constraints. But the form is by definition limited. Haiku is a wonderful poetic form, but most of us wouldn’t choose to adopt it for all of our verse.
From their earliest days, blogs were dismissed as a mundane form in which people told us, pointlessly, what they had for lunch. In fact, of course, as I reported in Say Everything‘s first chapter, the impulse to tell the world what you had for lunch appears to predate blogging, stretching back into the primordial ooze of early Web publishing.
Today, at any rate, those who wish to share quotidian updates have a more efficient channel with which to share them. This clarifies the place of blogs as repositories for our bigger thoughts and ideas and for more lasting records of our own experiences and observations.
There are a couple of serious limitations to Twitter as a blog substitute, beyond the character limit. But this post has gotten long — even for a post-Twitter blog! — so I’m going to address them in my next post, tomorrow.
Post Revisions:
- July 21, 2009 @ 07:08:15 [Current Revision] by Scott Rosenberg
- July 20, 2009 @ 07:29:00 by Scott Rosenberg
I’ve certainly started moving a lot of my link blogging into Twitter, although I do still occasionally write the odd ‘link round up’ post.
Interestingly, I think I’ve got to the stage, (whether rightly or wrongly), where I rely on people pushing their blogs through Twitter. (That’s how I arrived at this post, for example). I still use Google reader, but have less time for it, and I rarely ever use a blog search engine.
Enjoying reading the book at the moment…I thought Dave Winer on software could be transferred as a concept to news – http://bit.ly/juczT
I like to ‘Twitter’ nonsense anonymously on twitter. I have my ‘nick’ username and only one follower that I know in the flesh. My family blog is different. It is there to update family and friends who know us, so I have a different, politer, personality there. I can’t decide which one is the best, but I have more fun on twitter. At a party the other evening the topic of Twitter was raised and I was asked my username, but I refused to give I,t as Tairmuir is a different person to that guy at the party.
Even though I’ve been in the ‘web business’ in one form or another since 1995, I never had my own blog until I started one this past February. I’ve found Twitter to be an amazing way to connect with other like-minded bloggers (my blog is about usability and food/cooking) and as a way to promote my blog. I kind of wonder what people did to let others know about their blogs before Twitter…
I definitely agree with your points about the style and substance of blog writing. I often now think that some of the stuff I put on Twitter should be in my blog because it gets lost in the Twitter time line, never to be seen again (by me or anyone else, unless they do a search). I may start doing blog posts of past Tweets (Stuff I Put on Twitter).
I’m really looking forward to reading your book.
I’ve written a little about film blogging in some of my own research, and my impressions are similar to yours–Twitter is supplanting the link-and-comment post. If I want something more permanent, I’ll usually either bookmark it on delicious or will include it in a longer “links post.”
The other way that Twitter can supplement blogging, of course, is by facilitating connections between people with similar interests. By finding others who tweet about film, I can then fin blogs that better cater to my interests.