Posts RSS« Skittles site layout a sweet opportunity for IDing influencers | Main | Amazon fails at measuring perception on Twitter…at least so far »
Are technology and time teaming up against blogs?
By Justin Goldsborough | March 18th, 2009
Justin case you were wondering…I blog a lot less these days. When I first started blogging, I followed a strict schedule of at least one post a week and often more. I even established “blogging Mondays” for myself to make sure I took time each Monday to write a blog entry. Now I’m down to one or two blog posts a month and you wanna know why — reading and writing blogs takes too long.
Blogs are heralded as one of the founding tools in social media and a movement away from a “one-way, talking-at-you” mentality to a “two-way, talking with you” philosophy. But if you think about it in simpler terms — why complicate things — blogs were really one of the first steps in the evolution of online conversation. And as technology changes and evolves we have more of these conversations to follow and less time to follow them.
Maybe I’m just impatient. Or maybe I have ADD. But to me, reading a blog to get to the comments section where the actual conversation is taking place or writing a blog post instead of tweeting my thoughts and getting immediate feedback is starting to make less and less sense. It’s like when mom and dad made you eat your cooked carrots so you could have chocolate ice cream. You did it, but you do it begrudgingly.
Like those vegetables, I really do believe reading and writing blogs is good for me. The issue is time. Seems like each day I have less of it and more things I want to do, more conversations I want to have. Therefore, each day I become a bigger fan of just getting to the point. After all, IMO the biggest advantage of online conversations is perspective. Why wait the couple of hours it takes to write a post and the additional time it takes for you to read it. It’s not that I don’t value the opinions people share in their blog posts. In fact, those opinions — that perspective — is what I’m looking for. But I haven’t got all day…and neither do you.
Like I do anytime I have a hypothesis, I hit the tweets (not streets) to see what others thought and to check my own sanity. Here’s what I tweeted:
- Blogging less these days. Takes 2 long & feels a bit 1 way compared 2 tweets. Am I impatient? Crazy? Or r u tweeting more, blogging less?
And here’s what some of my Tweeps had to say:
- @tvsmike — A lot of people I’ve chatted with have said the same. It’s almost as if there are two types of SM personalities out there: Those who blog, and those who tweet and link to said blog. I tend to enjoy Twitter much more because I’m pretty sure I have ADD and I can’t focus long enough for a real solid blog post.
- @mvellandi — Indeed blogging is tougher work now. I’m doing more posts that link to and review news stories, using a bookmarklet.
- @robodaniel — Still prefer blogging. Takes longer & less conversant but seems more permanent. Tweets are fleeting like leaves in a river.
- @docsmooth — Blogging a bit less, but I think the content quality is up, since the small thoughts come out here. All i’m saying is I am not tweeting instructions to set up a secondary DNS server. someone else might figure out how.
- @movetrends — Agree and just read this post from @mcuban Where Does Tweet Time Come From? You may find interesting.
Conclusion? I think it depends on the type of person you are. Some people still like reading the newspaper. But a lot fewer people do it today than did even a year or two ago. Technology is funny like that — it has a weird way of infiltrating our lives and the majority usually rules adoption. I’m not saying blog posts are a dying medium like newspapers are today, but it wouldn’t totally surprise me if we saw that trend in the near future.
Blogs have been a great bridge from one-way to two-way communications, but near real-time conversations are the next step, a step many are already taking via Twitter, Facebook status conversations, LinkedIn questions, etc. What may actually keep blogs around for a long time is the value add that comes from the ideas shared in the comments section.
I still see value in blogs but I have to have the time to read them, like a relaxing Sunday afternoon, a lunch break or a long flight. Come to think of it, kind of sounds like the way I’ve heard some describe newspapers in recent years.
I’d love to continue this post, but I have some other work to get done. Plus, I’d rather end now so you can share your thoughts. After all, that’s the real value of the conversation — the two-way dialogue. Frankly, if I were reading this post and not writing it I’m not sure I would have gotten this far.
“The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent the positions, strategies or opinions of Sprint.”
Comments are closed.