I’m actively communicating online all day, every day, but my main blog languishes. Why is that?
Simplicity. Twitter tweets, facebook updates, Flickr photo posting, and sharing news articles with commentary… all of those things are easier and faster BY AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE than posting via Movable Type.
Yup.
Now, I don’t do Facebook, and have never had a justification (see below) for using Twitter. But my own blogging has suffered, net, because of my love affair with Google Reader, and the “Share” and “Share with Note” functionality in same. Where, once, if I wanted to post about something cool I’m reading, I had to be at my machine, open up a blog client, write something out, do some cut-and-paste excerpting and copy over the link … now I just click on a button to Share with other GReader users — or on another one and write out a quick note.
It’s that easy. That quick, painless, seductively easy. And the result is the flood of stuff that appears in the sidebar of this blog each day under “Unblogged Bits.”
It’s even better than that. I can sit on the train (or at a store, or pretty much anywhere) with my Blackberry, and go through Google Reader that way, too, including the Share button (alas, no “Share with Note”).
Now the fact is, I would never have posted as much as I share this way. And I do, if I have something of substance to say about a post, or it passes a certain threshold of significance, Star some stuff rather than Share it — the idea being that, when I get back to my computer with a few minutes, I can pull up those Shares and make posts out of them. (And I am gratified that not a few of those end up, themselves, Shared by others.)
But overall, I blog less, and I don’t like that. This blog is my journal, my extended memory. GReader can’t make up for that, especially since it doesn’t allow threaded commentary (thank heavens), and once something scrolls away, it’s only accessible via search. A month from now, or a year, or five years, I’ll never be able to find that really cool thing I once said related to an item in GReader. And that bugs the heck out of me.
The speed of posting/sharing GReader items is important, but the ease and portability of that sharing is just as important. The fact is, my life has, for reasons I’m not altogether pleased about, gotten a lot busier in the last year. As a result, I don’t do much posting from the office, and evenings are often a choice between a dozen different urgent activities, only one of which is blogging.
I can blog on the fly — if I take a picture. Flickr’s ability to post a photo from my cell phone to my blog is spiffy. But when it comes to blogging in an ad hoc fashion, there’s not a convenient way for me to do it.
Now, that having been said … I noticed that Doyce was playing around with some options to allow easier ways of posting to a blog (some working, some not). Indeed, one thing he’s looking at, which I’d not considered, is using Twitter. It appears that there are some Twitter-to-blog / Twitter-to-Movable-Type systems. That might be something to look into (or get Doyce to tell me what he’s doing). The ability to do easy text posts from wherever would be highly useful.
(I know there are ways to get Twitter feeds in the sidebar. That’s not what I’m looking for. I’m looking to actually send a message to Twitter and have it post online in my blog, and be archived there and the whole enchilada. This looks like a possibility.)
(Even better, I’d love to have a quick button in GReader that says, “Post a comment and include a link to this item.” That would be da bomb. And make it voice activated. And … and … colored cobalt blue. And ion-powered. And I want a pony. And a rocket ship. And …)
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{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ve run into the same problem, which I solved by creating daily twitter digests on my blog. The solution (Twitter Tools) I’m using won’t work for you since it’s a WordPress plugin, but it looks pretty similar to the one you’re looking at.
It does help keep my blog from languishing in once-every-other-week territory.
That’s definitely the direction I’m leaning here. I’ll have to play a bit.
Wired magazine ran a piece recently in which they said that blogging was so 2 years ago, and that twitter was the thing.
No.
My blog is when I sit down to write. I hit Google notes on things that interest me, but when I blog something, it’s brain, keyboard, Internet. And my favorite blogs are pretty rich material. I’ve learned, gotten insight, been entertained.
I almost started a sentence; “It’s true that some complete twits also blog” but then noticed the similarity to Twitter. Not sure what that means. And as Wired said, there are also corporate tools blogging, but it isn’t hard to find the really interesting people and subscribe to their RSS feeds.
Twitter may give an outlet to the “I’m eating a sandwich now” impulse. I have noticed a lot of my favorite bloggers posting less, but still some fantastic posts to read and think about.
It I’m doing Twitter stuff related to the blog, it will not be about “I am eating a sandwich.” :-)
What I would LOVE is the ability to use something akin to Twitter to send a post ’seed’ to my blog. This would let me remember the cool thing I wanted to blog about that I invariably forget about before I get to the computer at home.
So, not an instant post to my blog, but something that creates a ‘draft’ post when I transmit it that I have to activate before it’ll show up on the blog. That’d mean more immediate inspiration AND polished posts.
If anyone finds that, let me know. (I’m on Blogger atm, because I’m a newb.)
MT is easy peasy, very confused.
But, then again, I think this sums up my opinion of all things twitter.
I concur that the use of Twitter as a stream-of-consciousness trivia-fest is something I don’t understand. I understand less those who actually like to follow along that sort of thing.
Using MT to create blog posts is pretty straightforward and “easy-peasy.” Finding ways other than the delivered web interface to do it is sometimes more problematic, often error-ridden, and more difficult to find than on so other platforms (like WordPress).
So if I’m sitting on the train and I have a brilliant thought, there’s no trivial way for me to get that thought onto my blog. I can send myself an email to do it … when I get home, and logged in, and think about it. I can send it to the my blog at the moment if I send a photo at the same time (insert picture of Dave going “Eureka!” perhaps). But there are no smartphone-based blogging clients that work with MT, the MT web interface has gotten way to AJAXy for smartphone browsers, and older efforts to allow an email-to-blog-post interface for MT have long since been abandoned.
Using Twitter to that end actually seems like a very clever idea. Not quite as robust as an email-to-blog idea (the total message that can be sent is shorter, just as it is with a picture post), and the metadata is more confined (no way to specify a title, as Tweets don’t have titles), but something quite doable.
We’ll see.
I think Twitter, like a blog, an email, or graffiti on a wall, is as cool, worthwhile, interesting, as the content you put into it. There’s nothing about Twitter that inherently means; “trivial”.
~thinks Dave should post a picture of himself going “Eureka”~ :)
Ginny blogs on the subject.