Loading ...Thoughts on twitter and blogging
Recently I started using twitter more and more. It took me a while to understand its usage, but today I think of twitter as a very useful tool to quickly communicate and receive news. Instead of blogging about some news I find it much easier (and faster) to tweet them. For example:
- Debian GNU/Linux 4.0r8 eighth update: http://debian.org/News/2009/20090408 #debian #etch #
- Results for #Debian Project Leader 2009 Election: Steve McIntyre was reelected for another year! http://is.gd/s2xV #
could have been the subjects of a new blog post, but now twitter feels much more natural to share such news, that don’t really need a blog post.
Moving forward, I thought that bringing this information from twitter to my blog in a weekly digest blog post would be something cool, and users of my blog not using twitter could find interesting. I setup the wordpress plugin called “Twitter Tools” to do just that. Yesterday the twitter digest post was published and I was looking at it and it was not looking so good; it was just a list of thoughts that were not related, and were either outdated or taken out of some discussion had in real-time on twitter; it was useless…
The rather brutal comment I received immediately from @VonSkippy (thanks for being so honest and direct): “Your site is relatively interesting, so please don’t pollute it with useless crap from twitter” made me realize even better that my feeling was right. This was not bringing any value and taken outside of twitter the information was no longer interesting or uptodate. I asked some friends about their thought on this and they all felt the same; in the end I decided to disable the twitter tool weekly digest post and had to admit this was a mistake that I had to undo.
Regardless of this, I will continue to use twitter probably even more in the future as I still see it as a very cool and useful tool for quick and direct conversations and news sharing, but I will not try to substitute it to blogging and will keep them separated. If you want to follow me on twitter you can do that @mariusducea.
ps. the sidebar widget is a live update from the twitter feed and I will leave that on as it is definitely more useful and interesting than a digest, as a quick glance on the last tweets.
Tags: blogging, ramblings, site, twitter
14th April 2009, 23:42
I’ve always thought that twitter would be much more valuable if you could tag posts. I would happily declare all IT related posts as such and then be able to selectively publish only those entries to the blog
15th April 2009, 00:48
Thanks for disabling Twitter Tools
15th April 2009, 07:19
I tried the Twitter digest for a while and came to the same conclusions. But its not just Twitter I considdered having on my main feed.. what of Youtube videos or Google Reader shared items. Right now I dont automatically import anything, but at the same time I dont want my readers to miss something that may be valuable to them in some way. Especially the RSS subscribers, who dont visit the site itself.
15th April 2009, 20:23
@Matt: I think that even if that would be possible (basically you just need a tool to automate this while using regular #twitter tags), I still think this would not be very useful.
@Thefluffyadmin: it’s good to know that this didn’t happen only to me
; I was also thinking about the rss readers but also users that don’t follow up on twitter.
15th April 2009, 20:28
Matt, the Twitter community invented a way to do exactly that, check out
http://hashtags.org/