The Increasing Appeal of Microblogging
Blogging relies on technology which is sure to change at a rapid pace. A recent development is “microblogging.”
Blogging in the traditional sense, has become increasingly serious and complicated. There are so many metrics to track, feeds to read, and social media marketing to participate in, that some of the casual fun has vanished. Many blogs with full writing staffs are increasingly resemble old media. Then there’s all the tedium of spam, site maintenance, and trolls.
On the microblogging side is a dead-simple service like Twitter. Tweets can be pulled onto your own site and displayed there. They can be pulled into FriendFeed where they can spark conversation and garner comments. Microblogging is surely more conversational and casual. Instead of spending time with drafts and rewrites, we can distill thoughts into 140 characters or less and just fire them out there. Lastly, the ability to tweet using mobile devices allows for thoughts to be published wherever you may be.
I’m not stopping my blog by any means, but if you blog as a hobby and can value conversation above driving traffic to a website, there is a good case to be made for microblogging instead. The trend is worth looking into, if only to stay abreast of the changing technology blogging is based on.
You’re right. A lot of time when a blog post, especially an in-depth, create-valuable-content kind of blog post, just seems like too much work, Twitter is a nice, easy alternative.
But microblogging is more than an alternative. Services like Twitter can also drive traffic to your site and be an alternative forum for conversations on topics you blog about. So it’s a great supplement to traditional blogging in addition to a possible replacement for some more casual bloggers.
Yes, currently I’m using Twitter and FriendFeed as a supplement, but I do feel microblogging can be fulfilling in and of itself and “newbies” who once would have started a blog may choose to microblog instead. I guess we’ll see how the blogosphere eveolves as we move forward.