Twitter vs Blog

Assuming you read this site every now and then, it’s obvious that this blog gets little update-love these days, except for the Twitter feed in the sidebar.  Gone for me are the days of regular reada-friendly posts, and even though I make an occasional resolution to start up again, I’m still staring at the same three-week-old blockquote from a Paul Krugman editorial whenever I stop by my own site.

My Twitter feed, however, is rocking out — and by “rocking out”, I mean regularly bombarding followers with things they may or (more likely) may not care about.  But in a medium where 90 percent of tweeters proceed from “New at this” to “OMG so sleepy today!” to a deafening stream of silence, my 1,800-plus tweets can be considered justifiably rocking.

If the evolution of web publishing is all about lowering barriers between one’s mind and the rest of the digital world, and for better or worse, it is, then Twitter represents the most advanced step in that process. Twitter has mostly replaced blogging for me because it’s a better-adapted organism for purposes of getting thoughts from mind to screen. Most blog ideas appear as byte-sized bits of mental flotsam in the first place, which is then expanded into a few hundred ideally worthwhile words of blog post. Twitter’s great benefit is to cut out the grind work of converting the flotsam, so even more bits get to float down the stream without me having to do the work of thought expansion. Writing is annoying, so I love this enabling of unstructured laziness.

I still like the blog for longer-form thoughts, but for the day-to-day mind transmission, I’m tweeting this mug.