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

1. Blogging takes lesser time than tweeting
2. Tweeting is a long and tiring activity
3. The 140 char limit makes tweets heavily limited and a bit tough to express everything
4. Tweets are not permanent and have a shelf life
5. You have better control on blogs than your tweets
6. Blog posts are long , but can convey everything that you want to say
7. Twitter imposes a lot of rules on its members on networking and tweeting that sometimes get ahead of you
8. Blog is like a book and tweet is like a summary .

so if you ask me , Tweeting is not going to replace blogging

Technorati : blogging, collaboration, sharing, social media, twitter
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