Micro-blog killed the long-form blog
My last blog post was on April 28, 2008. My last pownce was 22 hours ago. I updated my Facebook status message 3 hours ago. And my latest tweet was 1 minute ago.
With all this up-to-the-minute information of what I am doing or how I feel, I have to wonder if personal blogs are becoming a thing of the past.
Using sites like Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, and to some extent Myspace/Facebook status messages keeps everyone in the know of how you feel, and what you are doing. Your friends can also respond with comments on your post (as seen on Pownce), or reply via a symbol trigger (@ on Twitter, ! on Pownce). Long-form blogs serve the same purpose, except allow a longer rant, and more in depth self-plugging abilities. So what’s the point of updating your blog when you can literally post the entire thing on Pownce? Is it simply aesthetic or RSS related?
Many of my peers and friends have made careers based on their blogs. Religiously posting their latest discovery or review, videos, etc. they have garnered great visibility with their own dot com. But even those folks seem to be moving towards twittering more, and Wordpressing less.
Like any new form of communication, or technology for that matter, the “old way” starts to diminish as more and more people jump onto the more convenient bandwagon of their choice. I do feel that micro-blogging is at its root more accessible. With services like twhirl, ping.fm,brightkite, twinkle, one can essentially mini-blog from anywhere at anytime, to more than one micro-facet. Services like those mentioned keeps popping up like your backyards’ gophers; there’s a new pile of dirt almost every time you look. The laptop-cafe culture of the late 90s is dying; the time of the smarphone API or dumbphone texting service is now.
Some may say that I am in a bubble, living in the very tech forward San Francisco, working for a new media company at that. On that same token, new ideas and ways of life are given birth here and spread to the rest of the nation like wildfire. The second sure sign of a paradigm shift: A number of people who add or follow me on these micro-blogs are under the age of 20.
Will Typepad, Wordpress, Blogger and the like go the way of the Do Do bird? Have you noticed this trend or are a purveyor of it yourself?
Great post, Neha, and I can’t help but wonder these sorts of questions myself. But when it comes down to it, I think there’s still plenty of room for personal blogging. I guess, off the top of my head, I think about it this way:
Technology evolves to mirror, enhance, or facilitate human interaction, and, if you think about it, there’s a flavor of communication that exists for just about every face-to-face parallel. A phone call is very similar to an in-person meeting. E-mail is more like handing a friend a memo and requesting that they get back to you. A Twitter tweet is sort of like giving your buddy a quick blurb as you pass him in the hallway.
If microblogging is your thing, by all means, go for it. But if you’re afraid to continue to embrace blogging because you think it’s about to die, I don’t expect there to be any real reason to let go.
Lemme know what you think.
A blog post is truly a valuable bit of content because it serves as a reminder that not ALL of human interaction will ever be fully mobile, instant, and brief. A 10-minute conversation with a dear friend will always be more valuable than 10 one-minute conversations, just like a blog post of yours of 1400 characters will always be worth more to your reader than 10 Twitter tweets.
Uh, and, for some reason, that last paragraph got out of order some how. It’s supposed to be #3. Look what happens, I praise blogging and it spites me by sticking a knife in my back!
I found this read very enlightening and humbling. As an amateur blogger myself, [I'm no good, really] I have found it extremely difficult to grasp what the next big thing might be. While being ‘in the know’ about what the new emerging trend is, is an advantage, your non tech-savvy friends, as I would happen to have it, won’t catch up by the time my blog fails due to lack of traffic. How do you tell people about the new “Facebook”, if they are basic ‘casual’ tech users? They are in fact going to be the ones who spread the word at first, right? I guess the trick is to find the balance between holding on to already established technologies, such as MySpace or FaceBook, and moving on to more “beta” style, micro blogging services [such as Twitter or Pownce] as a new way to communicate. I’m just having a hard time finding said balance. Any advice?
I don’t think blogging will completely die. As an example, you just used your blog to expand on thoughts and create a coherent article. This is not possible using Twitter, Pownce, or even Facebook to an extent (there are notes, but really it’s just not the same), or any of the mashups/mini-blogs. There is just something to being able to write a decently-sized post about some idea, rant, product, or just about life. It’s awesome to be able to write about something and potentially reach 100s or 1000s of people and have them comment on what you have said, and out of the many options, blogs are the best option for this. Yes, you can reply in Twitter and Pownce and Facebook, but character and registration limitations prevent these from gaining the universality and depth that come with using a blog.
I don’t think blogs will go the way of the dinosaurs. In fact, I think that until recently blogs were barely even discovered, and now they are taking off like wildfire. My hope is that people and companies will learn to integrate blogs with other mini-blogs to get the most out of what they can do with the power of the Internet.
Although, I do agree that micro-blogging, when adopted, becomes much more pervasive than straight blogging, I don’t think that long form blogging is going anywhere.
Microblogging has it’s benefits. I can have brief conversations and meet a vast population of people I’d never meet otherwise. The conversations, however, are usually quite brief. Especially in the case of Twitter. Much of my time on Twitter is spent sending these quick messages and the conversations eventually spill over into my analog life or to Skype.
Albeit, Pownce allows for much more long form blogging, I haven’t really been able to justify my account there. I have Twitter, I have a blog and I have a tumblog. Pownce is a service that really combines all three of these services and I’m not convinced that collision of services is really beneficial.
Long form blogging, like Wordpress, Blogger and Typepad targets a different facet of communication than microblogging. There is no way that even a series of Twitter messages can really compare to a blog article. (Again, Pownce is a different beast all together.)
I could say more on the subject, but it is a little late and I’m not sure if my message is all the coherent! I guess it just comes down to although I agree with your premise, I don’t agree with your conclusion.
Oh! I’d also like to add that the honeymoon period with services like Twitter and Pownce and Jaiku and Tumblr will be over at some point. I think that is the real point where accurate predictions can really be made.
At this time, these services are still new. We are only just now migrated out of the early adopter phase and into public saturation.
I don’t think that modes of communication ever truly die. Consider that people are still writing letters on occasion and using forums and BBS style sites and it could be noted that methods of communication may decline over time, but they do not die entirely (unless you communicate through laserdisk or betamax, but that’s a whole other story).
With micro-blogging, it’s great for status updates, but it’s simplicity becomes a crutch whenever you try to do other things with it, like reference posts to search, use tagging, etc. It works well for social networking as it’s basically short bursts of information (similar to social networks that are essentially short bursts of data tied to a human element).
I guess, I’d place money that the micro-blog will get more popular because it’s easy to access, but there may come a time that either a better format or even a medium format arises, like say, combining Twitter with DaMN (DeviantART Message Network) and adding in some lightweight blogging tech like tagging, sharing, more content types, bumping the character limit up, etc. At least, that’s my idea of what Twitter like services might be down the road.
Good question! The micro-blogs seems to be more present in our live, because we use them more often. They act also as unposed way to post articles. My work takes a lot of place in my blogger life, so I write article less frequently on my blog focused on techs and web developement. So I think all my readers and friends are looking forward to ervery new post on my blog. Less is more worth indeed.
I think micro blogging is great for quick updates, reporting from live events and generally, posting updates when you are on your mobile device and can’t use your computer for whatever reason. Having your own CMS can not be compared to micro blogging at all in my opinion. Blog is much better for promoting yourself or a company, selling things and advertise online. On the other hand, if you do any of this on any micro blogging platform, people just would not take it as seriously as it would be published on a website or a blog. It’s like one wears an awesome t-shirt at work and it’s cool but if the person wants to look professional, the suit is must-wear. I know it’s a stereotype but business is business. Same goes for blogging. I love Pownce,Twitter an Facebook but I’ll never stop blogging because of it.
I think the bubble thing is an important thing to remember. It gets harder and harder to consume media from the Web 2.0 crowd because I think they’re losing touch in a big mutual masturbatory mess of alternate reality. When I show people Twitter here in the Midwest, they don’t get the point, or understand why anyone would want up-to-the-minute updates on a person’s rest room breaks.
Anyone can peck out a couple of words, and frankly for a lot of far less talented people than yourself, that’s about as rich as they can communicate. That’s fine. Few great ideas, expressions of love or high impact declarations can come out of a short-form post. I firmly believe it’s just narcissistic noise, and not even interesting noise. It’s like watching Entertainment Tonight, which has little depth about celebrities.
Compare it to the average news package on ABC or something, like whatever forthcoming piece they do on Ted Kennedy. That’s the meat. The headline about his tumor isn’t a story by itself.
I can almost guarantee that any of the packages that NBC does during the Olympics will be a rich and interesting story too. Why? Partly because the 100m dash is boring, but mostly because the underlying stories are far more interesting. If it came down to “Bob Costas is eating a doughnut,” which is pretty much what Twitter et al. is, there’d be little interest.
Your blog posts are like these TV pieces. In that respect I would encourage you to not limit the scope of what you think a blog should be. Your Twitter stuff is likely relevant to your closer friends (and to stalkers), but I suspect that The Real Neha is a lot more complex and has more to say.
Keep saying it.
Holy smokes! Jeff Putz couldn’t have put it any better!
Microblogging is taking the blogosphere by storm. My wordpress hasn’t been touched in weeks, and it seems a bit of a shame. Tweeting (or powncing ;-)@KR) is sooo much easier, and it suits the younger generation much better than full on blogging. My friends would never get into blogging. Even with all the ease of wordpress or even blogger, it’s just too time consuming (and a bit boring) to write a post that’s worth reading - especially if you don’t initially have an audience. Much on the contrary, my friends and family love twitter, and its a great way to catch up with the latest goings on of all the admirable people in Cali, like @kevinrose, @Aubs, @alexalbrecht, @DannyTRS, @jeffcannata and (of course) @Neha_T.
Great post - I tend to agree that blogging will not die, and I’ll go a step further and say that it might actually become elevated. Microblogging has mass appeal, almost anyone can do it without much effort or skill. If microblogging becomes the communication method of choice for people who just want to do quick shout-outs to their friends or post short tidbits, perhaps then blogging will become more of a journalistic endeavor, the path taken by people who do want to write long, thoughtful articles, establish themselves as thought-leaders, and reach a wider, more engaged audience. Kind of like the difference between the many people who draw tons of cute stick figures on the sidewalk, versus the few who take the time to create paintings…
I do find myself twittering a lot more that blogging, but that’s largely because it’s more convenient and it’s the new toy. However, I doubt it will ever replace blogging, To use analogy that I’m sure someone else has probably already come up with, twittering is like poetry whereas conventional blogging is more akin to prose. One form is shorter and more concise, but the other allows for more detail. Both are valid forms in their own way.
I agree and I do not. I micro-blog and I blog-blog and I personal-blog. Why cant we do all three? My first blog, my pseudo-pundit blog, is the stuff I want taken seriously, the micro is forwarded to my personal one.
With so many aggregator and RSS/ API based cross posting programs, I see this becoming less a problem
The short-form blog is virtually of no interest whatsoever to anyone outside someone’s immediate circle. I assume you could care less what I had for breakfast, or what movie I’m going to tonight. After all, you don’t even know me.
The long-form blog is more for ideas and topics which may be of interest to others. It allows these ideas and topics to be more fleshed out.