Opinions And Ramblings By Adam Kmiec On All Things Media

I blog.  I tweet.  I read blogs.  I read tweets.  I’ve been doing this for a while now  Lately though, I’ve been noticing that people are blogging less, just like me.  They are trading their blogging for more and more tweeting.  Matt Dickman, David Armano, Steve Rubel, Peter Kim, Joseph Jaffe, and many of my other favorite blog authors seem to be blogging less.  It’s not just the frequency of the posting that’s changing.  The quality seems to be going down as well.  SPECIAL NOTE: This isn’t an attack on any of them; just an observation that you can choose to disagree with.  There are exceptions.  Jeremiah Owyang, bless his heart, keeps up with his blog and tweets really well.

Tweeting is easy.  Often times it doesn’t even require any serious thought.  You can tweet simple things like what you’re reading, a link you came across, or ask a basic question.

Blogging on the other hand requires a great deal of thought.  Well for me it does.  You have to pick a topic.  The topic needs to be something interesting and desirable.  From there, we need to develop the content to support the topic.  That often requires research to substantiate the point of view.

Effort.  Blogging requires effort, it requires an investment in time.  It often takes me an hour to identify a topic, write my point of view, pull the research (when needed), and then enhance the point of view.  In that 1 hour I can easily read through a few hundred tweets, write about 25 of my own, respond to 50 or so tweets, and flag enough content to follow up on for the next day.  Tweeting just doesn’t require a lot of effort.

I’m continually amazed at the signal to noise ratio of people’s tweeting habits and their blog habits.  My favorite example of this is Jason Calacanis.  I follow Jason on twitter.  For the last 2 weeks I’ve been categorizing his tweats into two categories: USELESS and USEFU.  Jason’s ratio was roughly (I’m rounding) 115 to 1.  Think about that.  I have to read 116 tweets, just to get 1 gem.  Contrast that to Jason’s new email list distribution, which is nothing more than a private blog.  Those emails/posts rock.  They’re well thought out, on trend, and 100% useful.  In my opinion he hasn’t missed yet.  He hasn’t offered one useless post.  You can see the posts here; he’s started posting his email as blog entries.

It’s clear that tweeting and blogging are different forms of communication.  They can be used complimentary.  It’s not about picking one or the other.  They’re used for different reasons.  But, that said…I feel a sense of concern for the future of twitter.  If the ratio for the quality of tweets remains low and twitter is simply airspace to talk about what you’re eating; can it survive?  I see so much promise in twitter.  I want people to realize the role they have to play in the twitter eco system.  There’s a certain level of responsibility we all have in keeping the eco system afloat.  I think we all need to acknowledge that responsibility.

It’ll benefit us all.