Blogging Making Comeback Over Microblogging?
Steve Rubel points to what I hope is a trend.
Interesting discussion overnight between my friends Robert Scoble and MIke Arrington over whether Robert’s personal brand diminished because of his love for Friendfeed. How refreshing and retro that this conversation is actually taking place via blogs instead of just on Twitter and Friendfeed, where I am sure it is also happening.
Basically, TechCrunch’s Arrington thinks Scoble is wasting his time spending the equivalent of a full-time job participating in social networks, mostly FriendFeed and Twitter, and that he’s doing both himself and his readers a disservice by doing that instead of writing longer form pieces on his blog. Scoble does the pros and cons and mostly agrees.
I’ve spent time on both Twitter and FriendFeed, find them both mildy interesting and potentially good sources of information, but still don’t truly “get” the fascination with them. To the extent they’re useful to me, it’s mostly in the same way that, say, InstaPundit is: as a place to find interesting links to longer form writing. But, frankly, the signal to noise ratio is better when Glenn Reynolds is picking the links.
People like Rubel, Arrington, and Scoble are interesting and worth following even if, like me, you’re not a full-blown techie. But even they aren’t interesting in the mundane level. Indeed, no matter how fascinating you are, I just don’t care what you’re having for dinner, what song just came up on your iPod rotation, or the fact that you’re about to enjoy a cup of coffee. Really.
Basically, I think I’m too old to “get” Twitter. I was already in graduate school when the first episode of Sesame Street was broadcast, watching it with some of my colleagues, and noting that it would be likely to reduce the attention span of a lot of kids who watched it. I just don’t find tweets that interesting or exciting.
Talk about the attention spans of gnats. We’re already to toss out blogs as last year’s trash now that we have microblogging in hand. That’s just foolish — it’s as if we expect the introduction of the four-minute YouTube video to eliminate the Hollywood movie. Does anyone keep a rational perspective anymore instead of wanting to go all-in on the Internet’s next incarnation of Pointcast? (Remember THAT? Oooh, push technology…)
The fact there’s even a discussion about this underscores that there’s too much navel-gazing going on here.