"as a blogger I find it insulting" "devalues the hard work that most bloggers do" "equating it to blogging in any form is wrong"
seriously, it can't be that hard to be a blogger like you, your bitching seems to come pretty naturally.
and i bet you could have condensed this whole rant down to 140 characters.
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
that post actually took me the better part of an hour to write. I don't do 10 minute slap 'em together and hit publish types of posts. Neither here on Mashable nor on my own blog WinExtra.
I try very hard to give my readers something of value in return for their time. And whether they agree with me or not isn't always the key reason for the posts - it is hopefully the conversation that comes as a result of the posts - much like we have seen happen here.
No 140 characters can even come close to equalling that experience.
Anthony Stevens
· 1 year ago
Did you get up on the wrong side of bed this morning? Why so cynical and critical?
You see the twaddle and spam, but regular blog platforms are rife with twaddle and spam as well, and the people *I* follow are indeed microblogging even if you personally don't like it.
I love the asynchronous interactivity that Twitter introduces into my life. So it's a good thing *you* don't get to define the terms in this evolution.
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
please explain to me how a form of communication that is limited to 140 characters and cannot contain any form of rich media other than links to off site can be considered to be evolutionary.
Anthony Stevens
· 1 year ago
You're trying to define blogging in terms of the tools, not in terms of the resulting conversation. Do you even really know what blogging is all about?
zota
· 1 year ago
I write essays -- on REAL PAPER -- and I consider all blogging nothing more than lightweight snot-nosed blather that shouldn't even dignify itself with the term "writing."
But once I publish my book-length monograph, I shall consider all essay a pack of juvenile idiots who are unfit to hold a pen.
And once I publish my ten book philosophical treatise (working title, "Blogging: What A Load of Egomaniac Crap") I shall consider mere book authors to be lazy unfocused twits.
The circle of life...
Michael Daehn
· 1 year ago
@Zota
u funny :)
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
yes it was humorous and I enjoyed reading the comment.
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
Zota I have been known to use real paper to write out my real thoughts to help me write my egomaniac crap that shows up on my blogs so really what is your point?
Michael Scott
· 1 year ago
Twitter is a perfect platform for microblogging. Check out @copyrightlaw, @internetlaw and @privacylaw for just a few examples of successful microblogging.
Michael Daehn
· 1 year ago
Steven,
You're right, it is not the same as blogging. And just like blogs there are different ways people use the tools.
I've had enough of the "I need to poop" and "I'm doing laundry" messages. On the other hand I love hearing some of my friends snarky comments about everyday life.
I also find value in getting alerts from people I follow when they post an item on their blog. That's how I got to this post.
Twitter, and tools like it, are in a new category. They aren't blogs and they're not IM. They are popular communication tools that are likely to be around for a while.
I think the issue is the value of content creation. There are plenty of automated and people powered aggregators, but without content creators they are worthless. In the long run all of these tools make serious bloggers/content creators like you more valuable.
I can't wait to see what the next new category is going to be. 3D virtual microblogging on the iPhone?
twitter.com/michaeldaehn
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
Michael - thank you for the well balanced reply and I agree with you that things like Twitter are a new category of communication tools but I still don't see it being in the same realm as blogging tools.
Mike Plugh
· 1 year ago
Twitter is a micro-blogging tool. The keyword is tool. The crap that some people post on Twitter is hardly worth reading at times, but so are almost 90% of the blogs out there.
Jay Rosen, journalism prof at NYU, does some incredible work bouncing ideas around with people via Twitter and actually uses it to interact with his audience to shape the larger, official blogging that he does.
Twitter is a tool for micro-blogging and it works really well for those who (1) know how to use it, and (2) have something worthwhile to say.
I would argue that the real value in the Twitter service is not the single update, but rather the cumulative set of updates that one can peruse to string together a train of thought.
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
how is using something for bouncing ideas around considered as microblogging? If that is the case then so is napkin based discussions at your local Starbucks .. oh wait they are probably using Twitter of IM do this now because face to face conversation and sharing of ideas seems to becoming a thing of the past .. yup we;ve come a long way baby.
Jeff Woelker
· 1 year ago
Splitting hairs? I mean, if you post 140 characters to tumblr or 140 characters to Twitter, what's the difference? If a client came to me and said they wanted to do microblogging, I don't think I could tell them the difference between these services with a straight face. The taxonomy is so up in the air right now that I think "status feeds", "microblogging", "life streaming", etc. are all applicable. I don't think we should squabble over this service supports 180 characters, so it's microblogging and this one only has 140 characters, so it's only status related.
I guess we'd need to define a checklist of attributes that define each. Perhaps I'll put that together, unless you guys beat me to the punch. I look forward to your rebuttal :)
fom - fit older men
· 1 year ago
@Jeff - you seem to never seriously have worked with tumblr (or soup.io). I actually have converted all my "old school" blogging for fosat from blogger.com to tumblr and I love it. You cannot compare twitter with tumblr. Twitter does not allow rich media. You can get as "long" as you want with tumblr and don't have to micro-blog with limited characters. Actually this freedom and speed is what I prefer. The real power starts when you have 2 or 3 tumblelogs you post to regularly (I do so with fosat and fom. Then you install the tumblr bookmarklet and can post from any browser whatever content (citation, photo, link, video) in no time real easy. THAT is microbloggin - it has to be fast and spontanous - no matter how long. Greetings - fom
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
I am taking a serious look at both tumblr and posterous in the next little while. Partly because I want to see what can be done with them and also because of your comments here -- so a big thank you for adding to the conversation (which would never have been able to happen on Twitter per se)
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
Actually Jeff I would really be interested in hearing what you haveto say on this in further detail. If you do email me at steven @ winextra.com with the link to the post. Thoughts like these are sometimes the best things that can come out of posts like this one and that makes taking all the flack worthwhile.
Neal Jansons
· 1 year ago
@Steven I have to disagree. Twitter is exactly a microblogger, and if anything Tumblr and others are microbloggers with more features (I like Plurk an awful lot right now). This is like saying photoblogging is just a virtual scrapbook and Seesmic is just webcamming. The technologies are basically similar, but the way they are used and the interactions they foster are different.
@Zota Funny. :)
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
thanks for disagreeing and phrasing your points as well as you did. I don't necessarily agree with them but I can understand how you came by them.
ralphthemagician
· 1 year ago
It's not a blogging tool. That's kind of obvious. I've always wondered why they market it as such.
At the end of the day, Twitter is a multicast messenger with an SMS gateway. No more, no less. It's the SMS gateway that actually makes it better than anything else out there.
Blogging almost implies a publisher/audience relationship. That really doesn't exist in Twitter the way it does for a blog. Everyone is on an even playing field, some just choose to watch follow more than others.
There are some people that use it as a blogging tool, but that's not it's primary use. It's a secondary function.
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
well it's nice to see that I am not the only one here that feels this way - Thanks Aaron :)
Julio Ojeda-Zapata
· 1 year ago
You can't put Twitter in a pre-existing container ("It's blogging." "It's IM.") because it's new, a hybrid service that has elements of blogging and instant messaging. Some carefully composed tweets are legitimately comparable to blog posts. Others are quickie communications among friends, a la IM. That's the beauty of Twitter, its flexibility and malleability. That's the reason it is so popular.
P.S. Bit grumpy today?
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
Julio you are right in that Twitter is most likely a hybrid of many different communication idea - all of which are totally different than what it was originally intended for.
PPM
· 1 year ago
Twitter and Plurk may be closer to instant messaging than to micro-blogging, although the distinction is to some extent a little academic as the "answer" mostly depends on how you use those multi-purpose tools.
PPM
· 1 year ago
Forgot to add that I visited this post thanks to a "lead" on Twitter ;)
10
· 1 year ago
Lol @PPM. Me too!
hephail
· 1 year ago
You sound like a great Twitters Anonymous candidate! :p "Steven says 'I am a Twitterholic . I have stopped Twittering for 2 nights and 3 days!'"
hehe... HAHA!
-Hephail
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
actually it's been closer to a week since I had Twhirl or TweetDeck running and I haven't missed the service one bit.
Mario Olckers
· 1 year ago
Uh... excuse me, who didn't take his lithium this morning?
Blogging is short for web log, meaning keeping a log on the internet of anything that you choose to share with the world, that pretty much includes Twitter, whether you choose to write a long mental diarrhoea type waffle or sharing links or status of where you are or what you do or what you're listening to or who's annoying the crap out of you by criticizing things he has no clue about;
It all is a log or record of events in your life as they happen and if you choose to share it online through whichever medium or modality, that constitutes a web log or blog; no matter how long or short; please get a clue, Mashable can do better than this *GAWD*
So there, happy blogging!!!
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
Mashable may as you put it "do better than this but there is no denying that this supposed useless post has sparked an interesting discussion with both points of view being discussion. Isn't the the whole idea of blogging in the first place??
fom - fit older men
· 1 year ago
I totally agree. I DO think though that the combination of (real) microblogging in tumblr and sending the feed to Twitter via TwitterFeed has potential. I use it in my blog fosat - The Future of Sex and Technology. This combination really makes sense - and I don't consider that as Spam. For me Twitter is just another way to "subscribe" to noteworthy content streams. Like: I prefer the new content of Mashable as a) email newsletter b) blog on a site c) RSS in a reader c)endlessly scrolling page like in a micro blogging container like http://www.soup.io or c) SMS-style like with Twitter.
I think it's a two way decision. As a news consumer you decide WHAT you want to read and in WHAT FORM you want to consume it. fom - fit older men
Orrorin
· 1 year ago
Blog = Web Log Log = Record kept of a trip, machine performance, etc.
If twitter doesn't keep track of your doings then it is no virtual log and therefore cannot be considered as a blog.
But isn't it exactly what it does?
Like Mike Plugh suggested, it is a micro-blogging tool independently of the way people use it.
Or maybe, we should call it pico-blogging and case closed?
tyler
· 1 year ago
lame. twitter is a micro blogging tool. that's a fact. live with it.
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
thank you tyler for that valuable opinion and input.
baz
· 1 year ago
@Michael Scott, those examples you give are simply news aggregation, not blogging.
I think we need to get our definitions right. Steven seems to be referring to "blogging" as the sort of long, non-conversational journal that encourages thought and comment. The other end of this scale is the simple posting of links to interesting stuff, but generally with a comment attached. I'd say this is micro-blogging.
Although Twitter does allow this, it's very limited - FriendFeed is much better as it allows direct comment and "Likes" and therefore encourages more interaction.
I would agree with Steven that Twitter is not a real blogging tool. I personally see it as a status feed - I installed the facebook app just so that I could set my facebook status from Twitter. I can then send to Twitter (and by extension, facebook) from my mobile.
I think Ping.fm gets it right by classing Twitter as a Status Update, and FriendFeed as Micro-Blogging.
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
thanks baz for the support :)
here's a question for you though now that you breought it up - do you consider FriendFeed to be another form of this socalled microblogging in the same way that people consider Twitter to be?
baz
· 1 year ago
If anything is "micro-blogging" it's FriendFeed. Surely the lowest end of the blogging spectrum is simply posting a link with a comment. That's exactly what FF allows you to do (esp. using the bookmarklet - just like "BlogThis!").
But that's not my point really. I'm sort of with you in you point that "real" blogging involves a bit more thought, and yes, "work". But we don't really need to label everything do we? Twitter/FF/Blogger etc. all do the same thing and they all do different things too.
Just FYI, Ping.fm lets you choose whether updates to Twitter are considered as "Status Updates" or "Micro-blogging". Ping.fm *does* need to classify these things to make the service easier for their users. But, do we?
Hofa
· 1 year ago
You annoy me. I'm sorry but you really do. It's the way you think about blogging that I really don't understand. You think of it as a form of hard work... Also you look at twitter as an IM, that's completely untrue, it's also not a microblogging platform and in that you are right. It's just something different, that's all.
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
Yes Hofa Twitter is something all together different and to a point Twitter as just another IM service may indeed have been stretching the point to a degree but I still believe that it is say we say a mix of IM and IRC.
As for blogging being hard work I still stand by that esepecially for those who day in and day out consistently produce valuable content that get people to think and converse about what has been written and the inevitable offshoots of discussions that can occur.
Pete Prodoehl
· 1 year ago
So wrong on so many levels...
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
well thank you Pete for that illuminating response - I am sure we have all learned something new because of it.
Wayne Smallman
· 1 year ago
Steven, I've been trying to tell people this for years — Twitter is little more than the ginger-haired half-cousin of the status update on Facebook...
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
nice analogy :)
Mathew Koeneker
· 1 year ago
Linkbait and bad conclusion making. It is a tool used for whatever purpose that it can achieve.
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
linkbaiting .. oh come on ... give a reat ... dislike the post - fine ... but linkbaiting I sorely doubt it
nafnosseb
· 1 year ago
Don't people check the mashable posts before they are submitted?
I suppose it is not necessary under normal circumstances, but this, "it devalues the hard work that bloggers do everyday" as the crowning shocking sentence, and the rest of it as irritatingly wrong should not have made it onto mashable.
Hope that I am understood. Punctuation is a foreign language to me.
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
Oh you are understood alright. You are understood that because you don't like a discussion point that it has no business being published on a blog you read.
and yes their are editors on Mashable who turn down post ideas all the time.
but thanks for illuminating the fact that it is beneath you to possibly take part in the conversation likea number of people here have and show how my assumptions are wrong - instead you don't think that opposing opinions shouldn't be published.
Dr Wright
· 1 year ago
Most blog say stupid stuff like, I washed the dog today. 99% of blogs suck and talk about nothing, Only 60% of Twitter posts suck and talk about nothing, so not only is it micro-blogging, its superior micro blogging because it limits the sucky-ness to 40 characters.
Great comment, Dr Wright. As I was also commenting earlier in this thread, it is indeed content that counts, not the medium, and those who only see "junk" coming from their twitterfeed are not properly managing who they follow! In addition, regarding the most junkiest of them all, Twittspam.org is there ;)
Josh
· 1 year ago
"...inane twaddle..."
Thank you!
At best, Twitter updates are a text message's worth of vacuous narcissism. At worst, they are yet another example of the ever more abridged and watered down information to which our diminishing attention spans limit us.
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
blessed be the MTV generation and their blind belief that the shortest possible soundbite is the best way to inform people .. ya .. right.
skarritt
· 1 year ago
YIKES...those are some strong opinions/statements! Let's look at the "qualities" of the various tools;
* Books - One to many, unrestricted length * Blogs - One to many, unrestricted length but generally shorter * IM - One to one, restricted length * SMS - One to one, restricted length
Twitter - One to many, restricted length.
OK, Twitter is clearly like blogging because of its "one to many" quality. BUT, it's also like IM and SMS because of its brevity. So, do we call it "Instant blogging", "Blog Messaging", "Simple Blogging", "Broadcast Messaging" ... or "Micro-Blogging".
It really doesn't matter WHAT we call it. It is what it is. Calling it micro-blogging doesn't devalue the work that I do as a blogger ... and, BECAUSE of the differences between the tools, they all serve a slightly different purpose!
It's all good.
ppmartin
· 1 year ago
I would add that:
* IM can also be "small group to small group", as you can do in a Skype "text conversation" with many people at the same time.
baz
· 1 year ago
QFT
Tony
· 1 year ago
It's comforting to think that the ways in which we express our ideas provide unique value, and are a demonstration of skill and hard work.
It's dangerous, however, to try to add value to the forms of expression we choose to use by devaluing forms that we choose not to use. The blogosphere has been targeted constantly via existing media outlets as being inferior. Some of the criticisms are fair, and spur bloggers to improve the quality of their work. Some criticisms come across as reactionary, and seem to stem from fear over losing market share and ad revenues.
Now we have this post, the first on Mashable that's left such a bad taste. As many other people have pointed out, Twitter is a tool with varied uses, some of which seem very blog-like. Something as simple as applying a modified version of the "blogging" brand (i.e. "microblogging") to Twitter shouldn't devalue the work you do any more than referring to blog posts as "macrotweets".
If the use of Twitter really bothers you, why not explore the territory and highlight good and bad uses of the tool? Simply arguing that it's not blogging (because blogging is something better) seems unhelpful and divisive.
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
Tony I have in fact written a number of posts on WinExtra about Twitter and how I think it is a good thing that could hold a lot of promise
and please don't misconstrue my post here as a negative against Twitter because I do believe that Twitter servers both now and maybe even more so in the future a valuable resource on many levels.
Robert Talbert
· 1 year ago
Most people indeed do not use Twitter for microblogging; if anything it's a kind of mass-broadcast asynchronous IM service. But that doesn't mean that Twitter, as a platform, is not a microblogging service. It could be, if users would treat it as such, and I've found Twitter to be a nice way to write up very short "articles" that consist of nothing more than a link with a note -- something that would complement my blog but are a little too short to be a blog post on their own. The fact that most people want to use it to tell the world what they're making for dinner or what-have-you doesn't mean that the service itself is inane.
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
I have never suggested that the Twitter service is "inane" I just havea problem with it being equated with yet another buzzword - microblogging.
Orrorin
· 1 year ago
More comments I read, more I have a feeling of deja-vu.
@Orrorin, just to let you know, there is a little typo in the subtitle of your blog
<>
Unless "Poietic" was written on purpose like that, with "poetic licence" ;)
Orrorin
· 1 year ago
@ppmartin, Nicely noticed ;)
It is no typo and I think you found the right meaning.
Sharon McPherson
· 1 year ago
"The fact is that Twitter is no different than another service that we have had for a very long time on the Web and it’s called Internet Messenger or Gtalk or any number of messenger type services."
Sorry, but my Instant Messages don't get indexed by Google, my Twitter "tweets" do if I use the right keywords in my "140 character twitpitch".
And I'm not talking about "spamming Twitter", but rather the sharing of helpful, useful information that even people who don't use Twitter are searching for.
Sharon McPherson @SharonMcP
Jolie O'Dell
· 1 year ago
This is so douchey!
Dude!
I'll just let you read my "Totally Not A Microblog" Twitter feed about how douchified this post is.
I blog when I have the time to devote to serious, well-thought-out posts.
When I don't have time, I tweet. And sometimes it's inane, certainly; but sometimes it's sublime, as well. I imagine the same is true for all tweeters.
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
what is this with douchey?
Is this the new swear word or a way to insult someone while appearing to be cool?
maybe I sould change my tagline now to read "your new and improved douchey cranky old fart"
kinda reminds me of grade school children wanting to swear but now get sent to the principal's office.
Johnny
· 1 year ago
Twitter is not IM. IM is one-to-one. Twitter is one-to-many. Twitter is also not Plurk or Pownce or Kwippy, etc., simply because it has more members, and in order for micro-blogging (or whatever you want to call it) to work most effectively, you need followers. With Twitter (and especially with twhirl and Twitterrific) I can follow the updates of multiple people without doing a thing -- I don't know any other app outside of Facebook (with an RSS feed) that lets me do that. True, much of what gets posted on Twitter is blather and I've probably been guilty of that myself. But most movies, books, TV shows, Web sites, blogs and blog comments are blather, too -- the underbelly of free speech and democracy.
getjeffrey
· 1 year ago
Well, S.H., aren't you quite the blogging snob. LOL.
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
really? .. wow .. first douchey and now a snob .. I'm doing pretty good so far today.
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
what I find totally hunorous about this whole thing is that I write up a post that doesn't call Twitter itself a waste of time but rather how people want to classify it as something that it isn't and all hell breaks loose in the comments.
At the same time there are any number of other posts that have been posted to Mashable that are probably more important and they are lucky if they get anymore than a handful of comments.
amazing.
Ru Viljoen
· 1 year ago
Ok, I did just say that i thought it was a post that was irritating and wrong without explaining why, so here goes. Regarding the way twitter microblogging devalues blogging. I can only conclude you are saying this because microblogging contains the same root word. I can not think of a decent example to demonstrate why i believe that is flawed reasoning but i do. You also say that most of the tweets posted are inane twaddle. If you use some aggregation service to just show random tweets you would discover a whole lot of noise, but if you discriminate and select people who are sharing valuable up to date links, activities, news, beta invites etc, it is easy to eliminate the majority of the "just peed" tweets. Many people don't have the writing skills or time to blog but can nevertheless discern useful information and share it quickly and to a large group of people. Sort of like a miniature blog...
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
thank you nafnosseb for returning and trying to clarify your position - I appreciate that. Perhaps my use of the word devalues might have been incorrent - even though I still thinkn to ta point it does - but not from the fact that people use the service is so many different ways. I have written on my home blog many times how I think that Twitter does provide a valuable service and probably some that we may not even realize at this point. That doesn't change the fact that I don't consider it to be a microblogging medium.
As for how I used Twitter in the past I first started out using it because I wrote one of the first desktop clients for (Windows only) so I had an extremely wide range of contacts. From the A-List right down to the "I just burped" crowd. Once I stopped developing I began to be far more selective about who made it to my Twitter list but I always tried to have a wide range.
At this point I haven't used Twitter or any of the services and clients built up around it for going on a week now and I don't miss it at all - I wouldn't be able to say the same about FriendFeed (which I don't consider to be microblogging tool either).
This really all boils down to personal choices of the tools we use to communicate and I have enough history in the computer and computer communication industry to say that nothing out there now is really all that new in principal. Sure the way they are being delieved - mainly by HTTP since that is harder to firewall against - has changed.
But none of this stuff is revolutionary or even evolutionary.
Again thanks for returning to expand on you comments - this is what blogging is about and could never be done with a 140 character limit.
the Michael Schneider
· 1 year ago
Twitter is nothing more than OpenIM (open instant messenger). I couldn't agree with you more.
graywolf
· 1 year ago
I'll offer up 2 tweets which are profound despite their brevity
Twitter is a communication tool. It can be a microblogging tool, a news-aggregation tool, a location-sharing tool, an IM tool, or a tool for twaddle.
According to the man who claims to have invented the term "weblog" our current "blogging" isn't "weblogging". Things change when people get involved.
WordPress is a "blogging tool" but I don't use it for a blog. I use Word Press to run a meme. For me, WP is not a blogging tool.
Twitter is just another way to write on the Web. It's a way to share information. Whether it's a "microblogging" tool depends entirely upon who is doing the writing (and the reading)... and the defining. :)
Bob Duffy
· 1 year ago
I consider Twitter microblogging. It logs my daily opinions, experiences on the web. That's a blog. But it is much more. It is social networking. I get more value from the network of microblogs from Twitter tnan any other source of media. I found this post from Twitter. And some of the best conversations and issues with my colleagues have been hashed out with Twitter.
Twitter is allowing people to connect with each other quickly and simply. The form lends itself to blogging of many quick and simple thoughts. With that you get ideas and expressions that represent a broad experience. Many inane and trivial while others capture valuable thoughts and actions the very moment they happen.
Why should that make it "less" of a blog. In some ways its a purer form of social media. Blogging too often mirrors traditional media tactics of well crafted and planned articles that distance themselves from the real time thoughts and feelings of the author.
Don't feel insulted that it's aligned with blogging. It's just another tool that many people are finding valuable as they embrace online conversations. That should not take away from traditional blogging.
Damon Billian
· 1 year ago
"The fact is that Twitter is no different than another service that we have had for a very long time on the Web and it’s called Internet Messenger or Gtalk or any number of messenger type services."
I agree:) The only difference is that the distribution of Twitter is different than the more established Messaging services & truly sits on the web as an application (not a download, etc.).
I am using Twitter right now, after a long hiatus, and I am still on the fence. But I don't think it resembles blogging in many, many ways...
Vanessa
· 1 year ago
I've come to the conclusion no one seems to know what a blog is anyway.
I could be wrong and that's okay, but I think what Twitter does is remind bloggers what blogging use to be before it became e-real estate and blogs began to look like registered domain websites.
Until I read this I couldn't put my finger on why I'm having a hard time--blogging lately. Just today I was thinking my blog sucks and wondered if I was just having a bad day.
It just might be that it needs to be more like Twitter: Writing what you want, when you want. Please, show me a true blog in 2008.
A blogger since 2003
Nosredna
· 1 year ago
You're wrong. You're following the wrong people.
Twitter is microblogging if you're following the correct people.
Some people can say more in 140 characters than most bloggers say in a wind-baggy 10 paragraphs. It's not work to say everything that comes to mind. That's just egotism.
Work is in editing, not writing.
Mark
· 1 year ago
No one's trying to make Twitter out to be more important than it is. You just have an incredibly inflated view of the significance of blogging.
Joshua March
· 1 year ago
You seem to be missing the whole point. 'Blogging' is simply a term for writing on the web. You may personally attach more memes to it, probably because you spend a lot of time perusing well thought out tech blogs, but the vast majority of blogs are personal notes, mainly meant for friends, on places like MySpace.
You may as well say that magazines aren't proper writing; only books are proper writing!
Twitter's a tool which allows you to maintain a blog-like website which you can update with small (micro) text (blogging). The term has absolutely no correlation to the quality or subject of the writing itself.
Dave Saunders
· 1 year ago
Before blogging software, I remember how blogging evolved from the web change log that engineers maintained as one of the pages of a web site (after all, we were engineers and we kept change logs of any source code base). Those change logs would pick up random comments like "going to see Batman tonight. Bought 39 tickes to take the staff" and in the mid-90s many started to notice the "change log" was getting more hits than the rest of the site.
That was a blog, in its raw form and that matches what these "micro blogs" provide in a very authentic way.
Yes, the common usage of Twitter may be like IM but that doesn't mean that Twitter is NOT micro-blogging. From the perspective of history, twitter is more like a blog than most of the blogs today.
Damian Madray
· 1 year ago
I somewhat agree with some points in your post. Sometimes, it does seem pointless but twitter is a great promo tool.
What I really want to say is that I think the fundamental problem about your post is that you didn't define 'micro-blogging.' You assume your readers know what it is and we do but clearly you have a different definition than the masses.
In order for anyone to completely agree with your point, you should give your definition of micro-blogging and maybe we could see it from your perspective.
Lastly, twitter as an IM? Twitter doesn't meet my need as any IM such as Gmail, MSN, etc. If it doesn't meet those need, it's NOT an IM. Don't make it what it's not.
littleidea
· 1 year ago
My initial reaction to the description of twitter, was 'that is the stupidest thing ever'.
Now I consider it a critical tool.
I search for posts about our product and retweet the good or try to help the frustrated.
Twitter is great at conferences and has got me more than a dozen face to face conversations I might not have had otherwise. That is just in the last 6 weeks.
The one point people seem to be missing in this discussion: twitter being one to many is not what makes it special. Using @, twitter is a conversation that other people can overhear. Twitter is like IM where all your friends can see who you are talking to and what you are talking about. That's where the magic happens.
Twitter being micro-blogging or not, is a non-issue created by people trying to define what they don't understand in terms of what they do.
twitter.com/littleidea
Nicholas
· 1 year ago
I noticed that earlier, you said that the point of a blog was to generate conversation. I think that is the main thing that your post misconstrued. Implied in this definition is that a microblog is something which is smaller than a blog, but still generates a conversation. Twitter falls under that definition.
You "devalue" your post by implying that blogging is something which can be devalued - this implies that blogging has some intrinsic value that you think Twitter cannot have. (You also somewhat "devalue" your comments by seemingly replying to almost every individual comment to your post, with a number of them filled with typos and unnecessary sarcasm, but that's addressing the person and not the idea presented here.)
As for this post getting far more comments than a "more important" blog post on another subject, the subject of this post is more magnetic to comments, as most inflammatory posts are. Whether this is good or not depends on what your goal for a post is - do you want to generate a conversation and have a large number of comments? Or do you want to inform your reader and enable them to learn something new? The latter is likely what the "more important" posts you are referring to are aiming for, while the former is what this post seems to be aiming for.
Neal Campbell
· 1 year ago
If Blogging is a contraction of Web logging, then Twitter fits, Brightkite fits, and almost anything that's recorded on the Web in any format fits. You're adding a time and effort component that hasn't traditionally been a part of the definition.
I put a considerable amount of thought into some of my tweets. It isn't always easy to craft a sentence in a way that fits it neatly into 140 characters. I often put much more effort into individual sentences posted on Twitter than individual sentences posted on a blog or comment. My last tweet took a good 10 minutes to get just right.
So if Twitter isn't micro-blogging what is your definition and what is your definition of blogging?
Adolfo
· 1 year ago
381 characters. The Black Sheep is one of the microtales written by Augusto Monterroso. This guatemalan is considered among the best spanish writers in the XX century because of his short fables (http://tinyurl.com/6p8ndv). There should be plenty of reasons to argue why Twitting is not MicroBlogging. I think size of the posts is the weakest. Most of the times, 140 characters are enough to say the things we use to say in our Blogs. Don´t you think so, Steven?
imma
· 1 year ago
I think you're a little hard on twitter - if it was providing an equal experience it wouldn't be a *micro* blog ;) Although an individual twitter post might not provide as much depth as a normal blog post a twitter conversation involving several posts can easily include more depth.
Also you appear not to be including the horrible spam blogs in your concept of bloggs.
- imma
ps : congrats on such a provocative post though - it definately seems to have made people think about it :) pps : is this a good microblogging example? a breif summary of what might go in a blog post : http://twitter.com/aaronrm/statuses/864231415 (random post i found looking for mention of 'Wall-E')
Doc Rock
· 1 year ago
One great side of twitter that is missing from this banter is the many tweetups that are held all over the world all generated for twitter. I have meet some great folk that way and have initiated some business as well.
Gizmodo was a great for profit blog that i used to read regularly and they had one too many socially not so responsible fails over the last year or so. Now many other "bloggers" are too having the same issues. So hearing directly from a few real people is awesome and helpful.
You sparked a good fight but why not try asking us how we feel about micro-blogging rather than spoon-feeding some less savvy readers with misshapen information. The people who use it know weather it is useful or not, not a one-sided review.
Just a thought.
Pascal Rauma, Finland
· 1 year ago
I re-read the definition of what a blog is (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog) and honestly I don't see in what Twitter differs from it save the obligatory length, hence micro. Definition apart, blogging is whatever one decides it is, provided it fits a/m definition, no matter the support/platform.
All Comments
"devalues the hard work that most bloggers do"
"equating it to blogging in any form is wrong"
seriously, it can't be that hard to be a blogger like you, your bitching seems to come pretty naturally.
and i bet you could have condensed this whole rant down to 140 characters.
I try very hard to give my readers something of value in return for their time. And whether they agree with me or not isn't always the key reason for the posts - it is hopefully the conversation that comes as a result of the posts - much like we have seen happen here.
No 140 characters can even come close to equalling that experience.
You see the twaddle and spam, but regular blog platforms are rife with twaddle and spam as well, and the people *I* follow are indeed microblogging even if you personally don't like it.
I love the asynchronous interactivity that Twitter introduces into my life. So it's a good thing *you* don't get to define the terms in this evolution.
But once I publish my book-length monograph, I shall consider all essay a pack of juvenile idiots who are unfit to hold a pen.
And once I publish my ten book philosophical treatise (working title, "Blogging: What A Load of Egomaniac Crap") I shall consider mere book authors to be lazy unfocused twits.
The circle of life...
u funny :)
You're right, it is not the same as blogging. And just like blogs there are different ways people use the tools.
I've had enough of the "I need to poop" and "I'm doing laundry" messages. On the other hand I love hearing some of my friends snarky comments about everyday life.
I also find value in getting alerts from people I follow when they post an item on their blog. That's how I got to this post.
Twitter, and tools like it, are in a new category. They aren't blogs and they're not IM. They are popular communication tools that are likely to be around for a while.
I think the issue is the value of content creation. There are plenty of automated and people powered aggregators, but without content creators they are worthless. In the long run all of these tools make serious bloggers/content creators like you more valuable.
I can't wait to see what the next new category is going to be. 3D virtual microblogging on the iPhone?
twitter.com/michaeldaehn
Jay Rosen, journalism prof at NYU, does some incredible work bouncing ideas around with people via Twitter and actually uses it to interact with his audience to shape the larger, official blogging that he does.
Twitter is a tool for micro-blogging and it works really well for those who (1) know how to use it, and (2) have something worthwhile to say.
I would argue that the real value in the Twitter service is not the single update, but rather the cumulative set of updates that one can peruse to string together a train of thought.
I guess we'd need to define a checklist of attributes that define each. Perhaps I'll put that together, unless you guys beat me to the punch. I look forward to your rebuttal :)
@Zota Funny. :)
At the end of the day, Twitter is a multicast messenger with an SMS gateway. No more, no less. It's the SMS gateway that actually makes it better than anything else out there.
Blogging almost implies a publisher/audience relationship. That really doesn't exist in Twitter the way it does for a blog. Everyone is on an even playing field, some just choose to watch follow more than others.
There are some people that use it as a blogging tool, but that's not it's primary use. It's a secondary function.
P.S. Bit grumpy today?
"Steven says 'I am a Twitterholic . I have stopped Twittering for 2 nights and 3 days!'"
hehe... HAHA!
-Hephail
Blogging is short for web log, meaning keeping a log on the internet of anything that you choose to share with the world, that pretty much includes Twitter, whether you choose to write a long mental diarrhoea type waffle or sharing links or status of where you are or what you do or what you're listening to or who's annoying the crap out of you by criticizing things he has no clue about;
It all is a log or record of events in your life as they happen and if you choose to share it online through whichever medium or modality, that constitutes a web log or blog; no matter how long or short; please get a clue, Mashable can do better than this *GAWD*
So there, happy blogging!!!
I think it's a two way decision. As a news consumer you decide WHAT you want to read and in WHAT FORM you want to consume it.
fom - fit older men
Log = Record kept of a trip, machine performance, etc.
If twitter doesn't keep track of your doings then it is no virtual log and therefore cannot be considered as a blog.
But isn't it exactly what it does?
Like Mike Plugh suggested, it is a micro-blogging tool independently of the way people use it.
Or maybe, we should call it pico-blogging and case closed?
I think we need to get our definitions right. Steven seems to be referring to "blogging" as the sort of long, non-conversational journal that encourages thought and comment. The other end of this scale is the simple posting of links to interesting stuff, but generally with a comment attached. I'd say this is micro-blogging.
Although Twitter does allow this, it's very limited - FriendFeed is much better as it allows direct comment and "Likes" and therefore encourages more interaction.
I would agree with Steven that Twitter is not a real blogging tool. I personally see it as a status feed - I installed the facebook app just so that I could set my facebook status from Twitter. I can then send to Twitter (and by extension, facebook) from my mobile.
I think Ping.fm gets it right by classing Twitter as a Status Update, and FriendFeed as Micro-Blogging.
here's a question for you though now that you breought it up - do you consider FriendFeed to be another form of this socalled microblogging in the same way that people consider Twitter to be?
But that's not my point really. I'm sort of with you in you point that "real" blogging involves a bit more thought, and yes, "work". But we don't really need to label everything do we? Twitter/FF/Blogger etc. all do the same thing and they all do different things too.
Just FYI, Ping.fm lets you choose whether updates to Twitter are considered as "Status Updates" or "Micro-blogging". Ping.fm *does* need to classify these things to make the service easier for their users. But, do we?
I'm sorry but you really do. It's the way you think about blogging that I really don't understand. You think of it as a form of hard work... Also you look at twitter as an IM, that's completely untrue, it's also not a microblogging platform and in that you are right. It's just something different, that's all.
As for blogging being hard work I still stand by that esepecially for those who day in and day out consistently produce valuable content that get people to think and converse about what has been written and the inevitable offshoots of discussions that can occur.
I suppose it is not necessary under normal circumstances, but this, "it devalues the hard work that bloggers do everyday" as the crowning shocking sentence, and the rest of it as irritatingly wrong should not have made it onto mashable.
Hope that I am understood. Punctuation is a foreign language to me.
and yes their are editors on Mashable who turn down post ideas all the time.
but thanks for illuminating the fact that it is beneath you to possibly take part in the conversation likea number of people here have and show how my assumptions are wrong - instead you don't think that opposing opinions shouldn't be published.
Dr Wright
The Wright Place TV Show
www.wrightplacetv.com
www.twitter.com/drwright1
Thank you!
At best, Twitter updates are a text message's worth of vacuous narcissism. At worst, they are yet another example of the ever more abridged and watered down information to which our diminishing attention spans limit us.
* Books - One to many, unrestricted length
* Blogs - One to many, unrestricted length but generally shorter
* IM - One to one, restricted length
* SMS - One to one, restricted length
Twitter - One to many, restricted length.
OK, Twitter is clearly like blogging because of its "one to many" quality. BUT, it's also like IM and SMS because of its brevity. So, do we call it "Instant blogging", "Blog Messaging", "Simple Blogging", "Broadcast Messaging" ... or "Micro-Blogging".
It really doesn't matter WHAT we call it. It is what it is. Calling it micro-blogging doesn't devalue the work that I do as a blogger ... and, BECAUSE of the differences between the tools, they all serve a slightly different purpose!
It's all good.
* IM can also be "small group to small group", as you can do in a Skype "text conversation" with many people at the same time.
It's dangerous, however, to try to add value to the forms of expression we choose to use by devaluing forms that we choose not to use. The blogosphere has been targeted constantly via existing media outlets as being inferior. Some of the criticisms are fair, and spur bloggers to improve the quality of their work. Some criticisms come across as reactionary, and seem to stem from fear over losing market share and ad revenues.
Now we have this post, the first on Mashable that's left such a bad taste. As many other people have pointed out, Twitter is a tool with varied uses, some of which seem very blog-like. Something as simple as applying a modified version of the "blogging" brand (i.e. "microblogging") to Twitter shouldn't devalue the work you do any more than referring to blog posts as "macrotweets".
If the use of Twitter really bothers you, why not explore the territory and highlight good and bad uses of the tool? Simply arguing that it's not blogging (because blogging is something better) seems unhelpful and divisive.
FriendFeed vs. Twitter & Why Twitter Isn’t Going Anywhere (http://www.winextra.com/2008/06/28/friendfeed-v...)
Is there a backdoor to mainstream popularity? (http://www.winextra.com/2008/05/10/is-there-a-b...)
The Twitter Obligation (http://www.winextra.com/2008/05/22/the-twitter-...)
and please don't misconstrue my post here as a negative against Twitter because I do believe that Twitter servers both now and maybe even more so in the future a valuable resource on many levels.
It starts to look a lot like the post I wrote yesterday: http://www.orrorin.net/2008/07/information-noise/
Isn't it?
<>
Unless "Poietic" was written on purpose like that, with "poetic licence" ;)
It is no typo and I think you found the right meaning.
Sorry, but my Instant Messages don't get indexed by Google, my Twitter "tweets" do if I use the right keywords in my "140 character twitpitch".
And I'm not talking about "spamming Twitter", but rather the sharing of helpful, useful information that even people who don't use Twitter are searching for.
Sharon McPherson
@SharonMcP
Dude!
I'll just let you read my "Totally Not A Microblog" Twitter feed about how douchified this post is.
I blog when I have the time to devote to serious, well-thought-out posts.
When I don't have time, I tweet. And sometimes it's inane, certainly; but sometimes it's sublime, as well. I imagine the same is true for all tweeters.
Is this the new swear word or a way to insult someone while appearing to be cool?
maybe I sould change my tagline now to read "your new and improved douchey cranky old fart"
kinda reminds me of grade school children wanting to swear but now get sent to the principal's office.
At the same time there are any number of other posts that have been posted to Mashable that are probably more important and they are lucky if they get anymore than a handful of comments.
amazing.
You also say that most of the tweets posted are inane twaddle. If you use some aggregation service to just show random tweets you would discover a whole lot of noise, but if you discriminate and select people who are sharing valuable up to date links, activities, news, beta invites etc, it is easy to eliminate the majority of the "just peed" tweets. Many people don't have the writing skills or time to blog but can nevertheless discern useful information and share it quickly and to a large group of people. Sort of like a miniature blog...
As for how I used Twitter in the past I first started out using it because I wrote one of the first desktop clients for (Windows only) so I had an extremely wide range of contacts. From the A-List right down to the "I just burped" crowd. Once I stopped developing I began to be far more selective about who made it to my Twitter list but I always tried to have a wide range.
At this point I haven't used Twitter or any of the services and clients built up around it for going on a week now and I don't miss it at all - I wouldn't be able to say the same about FriendFeed (which I don't consider to be microblogging tool either).
This really all boils down to personal choices of the tools we use to communicate and I have enough history in the computer and computer communication industry to say that nothing out there now is really all that new in principal. Sure the way they are being delieved - mainly by HTTP since that is harder to firewall against - has changed.
But none of this stuff is revolutionary or even evolutionary.
Again thanks for returning to expand on you comments - this is what blogging is about and could never be done with a 140 character limit.
http://twitter.com/gaberivera/statuses/778164333
http://twitter.com/JetBlue/statuses/807402526
According to the man who claims to have invented the term "weblog" our current "blogging" isn't "weblogging". Things change when people get involved.
WordPress is a "blogging tool" but I don't use it for a blog. I use Word Press to run a meme. For me, WP is not a blogging tool.
Twitter is just another way to write on the Web. It's a way to share information. Whether it's a "microblogging" tool depends entirely upon who is doing the writing (and the reading)... and the defining. :)
Twitter is allowing people to connect with each other quickly and simply. The form lends itself to blogging of many quick and simple thoughts. With that you get ideas and expressions that represent a broad experience. Many inane and trivial while others capture valuable thoughts and actions the very moment they happen.
Why should that make it "less" of a blog. In some ways its a purer form of social media. Blogging too often mirrors traditional media tactics of well crafted and planned articles that distance themselves from the real time thoughts and feelings of the author.
Don't feel insulted that it's aligned with blogging. It's just another tool that many people are finding valuable as they embrace online conversations. That should not take away from traditional blogging.
I agree:) The only difference is that the distribution of Twitter is different than the more established Messaging services & truly sits on the web as an application (not a download, etc.).
I am using Twitter right now, after a long hiatus, and I am still on the fence. But I don't think it resembles blogging in many, many ways...
I could be wrong and that's okay, but I think what Twitter does is remind bloggers what blogging use to be before it became e-real estate and blogs began to look like registered domain websites.
Until I read this I couldn't put my finger on why I'm having a hard time--blogging lately. Just today I was thinking my blog sucks and wondered if I was just having a bad day.
It just might be that it needs to be more like Twitter: Writing what you want, when you want. Please, show me a true blog in 2008.
A blogger since 2003
Twitter is microblogging if you're following the correct people.
Some people can say more in 140 characters than most bloggers say in a wind-baggy 10 paragraphs. It's not work to say everything that comes to mind. That's just egotism.
Work is in editing, not writing.
You may as well say that magazines aren't proper writing; only books are proper writing!
Twitter's a tool which allows you to maintain a blog-like website which you can update with small (micro) text (blogging). The term has absolutely no correlation to the quality or subject of the writing itself.
That was a blog, in its raw form and that matches what these "micro blogs" provide in a very authentic way.
Yes, the common usage of Twitter may be like IM but that doesn't mean that Twitter is NOT micro-blogging. From the perspective of history, twitter is more like a blog than most of the blogs today.
What I really want to say is that I think the fundamental problem about your post is that you didn't define 'micro-blogging.' You assume your readers know what it is and we do but clearly you have a different definition than the masses.
In order for anyone to completely agree with your point, you should give your definition of micro-blogging and maybe we could see it from your perspective.
Lastly, twitter as an IM? Twitter doesn't meet my need as any IM such as Gmail, MSN, etc. If it doesn't meet those need, it's NOT an IM. Don't make it what it's not.
Now I consider it a critical tool.
I search for posts about our product and retweet the good or try to help the frustrated.
Twitter is great at conferences and has got me more than a dozen face to face conversations I might not have had otherwise. That is just in the last 6 weeks.
The one point people seem to be missing in this discussion: twitter being one to many is not what makes it special. Using @, twitter is a conversation that other people can overhear. Twitter is like IM where all your friends can see who you are talking to and what you are talking about. That's where the magic happens.
Twitter being micro-blogging or not, is a non-issue created by people trying to define what they don't understand in terms of what they do.
twitter.com/littleidea
You "devalue" your post by implying that blogging is something which can be devalued - this implies that blogging has some intrinsic value that you think Twitter cannot have. (You also somewhat "devalue" your comments by seemingly replying to almost every individual comment to your post, with a number of them filled with typos and unnecessary sarcasm, but that's addressing the person and not the idea presented here.)
As for this post getting far more comments than a "more important" blog post on another subject, the subject of this post is more magnetic to comments, as most inflammatory posts are. Whether this is good or not depends on what your goal for a post is - do you want to generate a conversation and have a large number of comments? Or do you want to inform your reader and enable them to learn something new? The latter is likely what the "more important" posts you are referring to are aiming for, while the former is what this post seems to be aiming for.
I put a considerable amount of thought into some of my tweets. It isn't always easy to craft a sentence in a way that fits it neatly into 140 characters. I often put much more effort into individual sentences posted on Twitter than individual sentences posted on a blog or comment. My last tweet took a good 10 minutes to get just right.
So if Twitter isn't micro-blogging what is your definition and what is your definition of blogging?
There should be plenty of reasons to argue why Twitting is not MicroBlogging. I think size of the posts is the weakest. Most of the times, 140 characters are enough to say the things we use to say in our Blogs. Don´t you think so, Steven?
Although an individual twitter post might not provide as much depth as a normal blog post a twitter conversation involving several posts can easily include more depth.
Also you appear not to be including the horrible spam blogs in your concept of bloggs.
- imma
ps : congrats on such a provocative post though - it definately seems to have made people think about it :)
pps : is this a good microblogging example? a breif summary of what might go in a blog post : http://twitter.com/aaronrm/statuses/864231415 (random post i found looking for mention of 'Wall-E')
Gizmodo was a great for profit blog that i used to read regularly and they had one too many socially not so responsible fails over the last year or so. Now many other "bloggers" are too having the same issues. So hearing directly from a few real people is awesome and helpful.
You sparked a good fight but why not try asking us how we feel about micro-blogging rather than spoon-feeding some less savvy readers with misshapen information. The people who use it know weather it is useful or not, not a one-sided review.
Just a thought.
Definition apart, blogging is whatever one decides it is, provided it fits a/m definition, no matter the support/platform.
Let's just say all I wanted to do that night was to be able to twitter to my blog!!