I confess I just started tweeting recently. I had been watching Twitter out of curiosity for a long time before I decided to jump in.
The more I looked at it the more I found it to be … well, random bragging about your unexceptional life. As best described in this SuperNews cartoon.
Slowly but surely I find myself replacing my daily blog reading habits with Twitter. I have a bunch of RSS feeds and a long list of bookmarked blogs. But I find myself just checking in on my Twitter page. Almost everyone I am following on Twitter is someone who has a blog I was checking almost daily.
Some of the blogs I followed are done be exceptionally good writers and story tellers. I would much rather read a full blog posting or story from these people than just a Tweet – and many of these people have already effectively figured out how to Tweet and get my attention – and then I’m off to their blog to read the full story.
For the other blogs I check out… Twitter helps me avoid wasting time scanning through their blogs. Twitter forces them to get to the point – thank God.
So has Twitter killed blogging? Not yet. But with our ever shorter attention spans … it’s got a shot.
My first blog was a little website I did for fun way back in the late 1990′s before the word “blog” existed. I mused about web development, my guitar and studio gear collection, some other hobbies, and life in general. To my surprise, the traffic on the site climbed with every post.
I split off the most popular part of that first site and since then I have blogged almost every day (or at least every week) on it. It’s been a pretty amazing experience. While 98% of the experience has been positive, the 2% negative was tough – at first.
All things considered, I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything. We’ll talk more about that website in posts to come.
If you’ve been thinking about getting your company or yourself into blogging, I can highly recommend “Blog Rules – A Business Guide to Managing Policy, Public Relations, and Legal Issues” by Nancy Flynn. The book will guide you through many of the issues and give you a firm footing to start blogging from.
We’ll be talking about the various aspects of blogging here in the days to come, as well as many other aspects of life on the web. Enjoy.
Larry Preston