Friday, June 13, 2008

Most bloggers should tweet instead

In the cacophonous jumble of thoughts that bounce through our heads every day, there are a few that stand out. We feel compelled to share these observations and ruminations -- the uncommon moment, for example, where you see a mailman who is walking quickly and smoking a cigar.

I've been using Twitter for about a month now and I've found it's a handy way to bookmark such observations and ruminations when they happen. And I've come to appreciate the beauty of Twitter's brevity constraint: your posts (or tweets) can be no longer than 140 characters.

What's so good about this extreme conciseness? This: it forces you to get to the point. Have you ever taken a random walk down blog street? Granted, there are great blogs out there, but the vast majority are one of two types:

  • Ramblefests: Stream-of-conscious rants that are ferociously uninteresting.
  • Copycats: Multi-paragraph quotations from news sites and other blogs, with maybe a sentence or two of original commentary.
All the bloggers that fit in the above two categories should discover the joy of Twitter -- where there's really only room for original content. And where it's difficult to repeat yourself (unless you accidentally hit the "update" button six times, like I did the other day).

You can stalk me on Twitter here: http://twitter.com/thefoible

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Should one read the content of this post as you saying goodbye to the blog medium?

Jonathan said...

either that or I'm on a very long hiatus. :)

Anonymous said...

When the camera was invented, many said that it was the end of painting... With the advent of twitter we risk losing some of the great arbiters of online culture, the painters of web 2.0 as they head off to tweet... 176 characters and counting, so there twitter…