Will tweeting kill blogging ?
I keep hearing people say that tweeting is not letting them blog or that tweeting is going to kill blogging eventually .This is somewhat a trend now and more and more people are saying this and trying to be fashionable . Let us take that question up and try to deliberate on this in this post . After all it is the New Year and reflection is in order .So I will take this as my debating point for 2010 . Let us go in detail
The twitter phenomenon began as a nice fancy way of using 140 characters to say what you are doing . So to begin with it was a lot of personal banter about tying up shoe laces and having a bath and the like . Then the advent of serious and genuine users transformed it instantly into a powerful and almost spontaneous medium for sharing / posting information . People started using it to get / post breaking news . This pattern grew to such a magnitude that there have been instances of media houses using twitter as the source for news and even national controversies erupting over tweets of people like Shashi Tharoor from India .The other set of people who are on twitter are the marketing brigade who painstakingly build a brand and then use that identity and clout to either subtly or blatantly peddle their wares. Apart from all these , the ordinary person using twitter , started doing a big thing silently , slowly and surely , he/she stopped or reduced blogging and started tweeting more often . That brings us to the point in contention – the title of this post .
So what kind of bloggers are moving to tweets , mostly the personal and experiential bloggers who had to painstakingly write and then wait for the hits on their blog .They jumped on to twitter and found solace at the velocity of their thoughts reaching all their followers immediately and started replacing their blogs with the micro blogging platform that twitter is . At this point it would be worth noting that the serious niche blogger still likes and writes on his/her blog regularly .After having done that he/she follows a carefully thought out a crafted twitter strategy to drive traffic to the blog and get eyeballs on the post . The network that twitter is now , is a huge push in that direction .After the advent of twitter Blogs like TechCrunch and Mashable have become legends in their own right and command a respect of their own . So there is the answer . what ?
Blogs and tweets are different and you cannot cut with a spoon or scoop with a rifle , Everything has its place and belongs there . IMHO twitter at some point in the info sharing cycle feeds off a source and in 98 out of 100 cases it is a blog invariably . That means that the relationship is symbiotic and self sustaining . As long as there is twitter there is need for blogs and other traditional sources of information to form the crux of the data . So if the general talk is that tweeting is replacing blogging , my take is that it never will in its entirety , maybe here and there but never fully . Also a few observations that I made which can be used to understand a few facts better
- Blogging takes lesser time than tweeting
- Tweeting is a long and tiring activity
- The 140 char limit makes tweets heavily limited and a bit tough to express everything
- Tweets are not permanent and have a shelf life
- You have better control on blogs than your tweets
- Blog posts are long , but can convey everything that you want to say
- Twitter imposes a lot of rules on its members on networking and tweeting that sometimes get ahead of you
- Blog is like a book and tweet is like a summary .
so if you ask me , Tweeting is not going to replace blogging
Twitter has become a powerful tool to promote your blogs these days. I read this article only due to the fact that i saw your tweet about this post.
Twitter and blogs are interconnected and will go on hand in hand
+1 on that. I seldom blogged before I jumped into Twitter. Twitter set the thought processes in motion and blogging helps me put a lot of my thoughts and opinions into words. Just like you said, 140 characters is a very small chunk to put everything one wants to convey. The two complement each other.
I totally agree with you. I think why tweeter is so successful is because it did not try to replace blogging or email.
totally! u need not even conclude dat, ur post screams that both are diff n tweets will never replace blog posts.
I agree – we cannot lose sight of the need for longer commentary or analytical pieces that require the blog and longer format presentation. Twitter is very valuable if used properly – a risk though is trending the attention spans of folks to not tolerate the “long read”. It would be destructive intellectually and from a review and research perspective to lose the ability to read extended content. We can look to the emergence of 24 hour news and sound bites as an example of the loss of interest in longer and more sophisticated news.
I am glad that all 5 of you agree with me . Thanks a ton for the comments friends !
They’re apples and oranges; twitter is great for promoting one’s blog or keeping up those quick fire comments, useful nuggets of information and general short ’stream of conciousness’ goodies that would never make my Blog.
The day that we have readers with a 140 character attention span is the day I’ll retreat to a Monastery and take up writing parchments.
Right on Joe ! There is no comparison at all !
I also blog and tweet and very regularly. I also do not agree that tweeting is replacing blogging, it cant. blogging is where u can express in detail which u cant in 140 char.
Tweets are just a synopsis of what to expect in your blogs…They are co dependent on each other.. If you hav a blog yu tweet and get visitors and if you hav good blog posts then people follow your tweets.
I agree with you ! Thanx for the comment sir !
The challenge of Twitter is understanding how you can use it and yes that can be frustrating at first.
The web as we know it has gone from web 1.0 = static content to web 2.0 = applications online to web 3.0 = semantic web. Web 4.0 seems to be heading for the Real Time Web where the value of the information you have is multiplied geometrically by the “freshness of your produce”, old news is no news….
Twitter is and always will be the cherry and the icing on blogging’s cake.
Exactly my line of thought ! Thank you J R
Dear Shakthi,
I kinda agree with your 5 points, Web 2.0 is all about conversations. And twitter is the best tool for short n quick conversations.
Blog gives u better platforms to express (long texts, images, videos etc) but twitter gives you short and instant conversations.
Moreover Twitter is real time, whcih helps you in getting answers ASAP.
And coming to your topic, No Twitter is not going to replace Blogging. They will exist simultaneously, although the way twitter user are shouting together, it will make people use twitter more sensibly (following the people u need, want).
Exactly !
I agree with most/all of the commentary. Blogging & tweeting serve 2 different functions, and like most, I use Tweets to try and drive traffic to my blog. Heaven forbid if we had to limit all conversations and thought processes to just 140 characters!
by no means twitter can kill blogging, it’s the platform where we share thoughts and promote our blog, its the medium of publicity ( frankly ). Both twitter and blogging are interconnected !
I kind of half heartedly agree with what you’ve written!
But twitter is just a short message of update of one’s blog. Blog is an essay whereas twitter is can be classified as precis writing restricted to 140 characters. Now that twitter is coming up with new features, it is still not compared with blogging. Even today blogging and twitter are seen as two different favouring sites. It is inter-related and yet independent!
Completely agree with you. Twitter for me made blogging (the longer version that is) more enjoyable. I can now get more ‘hits’ as you say
and basically share my thoughts better with people.
Blogging is serious business. You have proven that. Those who werent bloggers/were part time bloggers before twitter came into being, wont feel the urge to blog now. Twitter makes absolutely no difference to bloggers/non-bloggers (except as i said earlier, getting more hits).