Blog or Microblog?
Written on August 16, 2009 by Katherine W. Prawl
I was just listening to the latest episode of This Week in Google (TWiG), a new Leo Laporte podcast, when I was struck by the discussion of how microblogging, as on Twitter or Facebook, can sometimes steal posts away from “normal” blogs. I’m not the only one out there who finds myself tweeting instead of writing new blog entries, apparently.
It got me to thinking about the differences between these various methods of self-expression and communication. It’s true that all these social media/social networking sites are attractive, but for different reasons, and possibly different reasons exist for different people, or different moods in the same person. I like Twitter for its immediacy and the ease of very short form updates. I like Facebook because it makes it easy to share photos and my Twitter feed, and for the interactions in comments on my page and those of my contacts. LinkedIn is a good place to keep my expanded résumé, and offers what may be more serious discussion forums than I’ve found elsewhere (although I find I don’t have time to follow them). The dozens of Ning networks I’ve signed up for took a lot of my attention for a few weeks earlier this year, but now I rarely look at them.
For me, my blogs are completely different from the networks I belong to. When I do post blog entries, they tend to be longer and better researched than social network posts, which might explain why I don’t write them as often. It’s a bigger commitment of time and effort. Blogs also have a more permanent feeling to them, with several years’ worth of entries available in their archives, while Twitter and Facebook postings quickly scroll off the page, sometimes in just a few hours, and certainly in no more than days. Indeed, some Twitter users, like Jay Rosen of New York University’s Journalism Institute have been agitating recently for Twitter to provide a searchable archive of past tweets, which highlights the fact that such an archive doesn’t exist.
As we used to say on the pre-Web BBS, YMMV (Your Milage May Vary), but for me there’s a time and place for all these expressive outlets, and I’ll keep using them at least until the next greatest thing comes along.
May 1st, 2010 at 6:53 am
microblogging is really useful when you want to broadcast short updates. i am still leaning towards traditional blogging.:-;