Twitter Killed My Blog

"Rewritten by machine and new technology,
and now I understand the problems you can see."

The Buggles - Video Killed the Radio Star

I realized today, with amazement, that it has almost been 3 months since my last blog post, and that this is just my 7th post since May.  This is by far the slowest blogging I have ever logged and I am a bit embarassed.

In parallel, I have probably been tweeting on average twice a day for the same period.

In short, Twitter has killed by blogging.  And I suspect I am not alone.

I also realized that I am not as good a blogger as I fancied myself to be.  When I analyze the 500+ blog entries I have written over the 5 year life span of this blog, I find that most of them are reflections on content that has been created elsewhere - mostly links and comments to others' blog posts,  videos, articles, etc.

In other words, they have been glorified ReTweets.  And the same act now takes me a few seconds (to retweet), as opposed to the 15-minute blocks of time that a blog post typically requires.

From now on, I'll stop fighting the natural flow and try to RT when that is all that's called for.  So this blog will probably see fewer entries but hopefully more original thinking.

If you enjoy hearing from me, you can follow me at http://twitter.com/csertoglu.

 

 

Comments

[Kosta]

Nice observation! Typepad might lose a client soon :-). But hey, I've checked your blog, Your posts might had been based on some others thoughts ideas, occurrences etc, but you've always added value to them - your own sanction. And this value seems to be larger then just fitting into 140 characters :-). You see, Charlie Chaplin in the movie "modern times" was sitting at the conveyor but he added some parts to the stuff passing on, right? The real value of the person in the information economy is not just bitte-danke passing over bricks of info to the other one, but adding value. You surely add value by filtering and passing on, but its much insignificant then adding your own thoughts to it. I hate comments longer then the article itself :-).

[csertoglu]

@kosta - I am not sure that the value can not be shrunk to 140 characters in 80% of the cases. For the remaining 20%, I'll keep the blog alive (and continue paying TypePad). However, if I was doing it fresh, I'd probably go with Tumbler or Posterous. TypePad is way to omuch of a CMS these days for mere blogging.

[Emin]

Good point.

My blogging is also a lot less now but for a different reason.

If something is short enough to tweet about it, I tweet and get it over with. If it's something to be explored, I get lazy with all the twitter feed and the iPad reading.

So basically my online time has become more passive. Twitter and iPad are to blame.