Different Strokes For Different Folks

My boss was kind enough to send me the link to "this Wired.com article about how 'Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004'":http://www.wired.com/entertainment/theweb/magazine/16-11/st_essay. I think their article has some merit, but there is something they are missing. I'm not sure about you, but I'm the exact opposite of what they are talking about.

bq. Twitter — which limits each text-only post to 140 characters — is to 2008 what the blogosphere was to 2004. You'll find Scoble, Calacanis, and most of their buddies from the golden age there. They claim it's because Twitter operates even faster than the blogosphere. And Twitter posts can be searched instantly, without waiting for Google to index them.

It's all about getting their information and ideas out there. That is, Scoble, Calacanis, et al. originally started blogs because they had information they wanted to know and blogs provided them with an adequate time-to-published latency. They wanted to get their ideas out there as fast as they could. But just because something is fast, doesn't mean it's better. Take txt messaging as an example.

You can let someone know that you're going to be late by txting them. It's extremely fast and is perfect for what you are trying to do. But you wouldn't want to try to explain anything in great detail in bursts of 140-characters-or-less messages that automatically broadcast to anyone who might be even slightly interested in what you have to say. It's too easy to be too-brief and pull the trigger too quickly on something that might be dumber than you expected because it's not subjected to the scrutiny that a regular, typed out post very well would be.

Blogs are still one of the fastest media out there for publishing and for the other 99.5% of us, they'll be the medium of choice for many years to come. Twitter and Facebook are the medication deprived ADHD stepchildren of blogs. They are most definitely not the blogs of yesteryear, no matter what their parents might say.