Brad Rourke

Tweets Squeezing Out Rants

Brian Solis of TechCrunch wrote an important review of an interesting trend in today’s social media world.

We are learning to publish and react to content in “Twitter time” and I’d argue that many of us are spending less time blogging, commenting directly on blogs, or writing blogs in response to blog sources because of our active participation in micro communities.

With the popularity and pervasiveness of microblogging (a.k.a. micromedia) and activity streams and timelines, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and the like are competing for your attention and building a community around the statusphere – the state of publishing, reading, responding to, and sharing micro-sized updates.

This new genre of rapid-fire interaction is further distributing the proverbial conversation and is evolving online interaction beyond the host site through syndication to other relevant networks and communities.

In most cases attention for commenters at the source post are competing against the commenters within other communities. Those who might typically respond with a formal blog post may now choose to respond with a tweet or a status update.

Result: The “traditional” venue of blogs-and-comments has been disrupted and faces challenges. Just as deadtree news laments its disappearing readership (and hence business model) — blogs face the very same disruptive situation.

This is an interesting conundrum for content-creators. On the one hand, you want to get your stuff out there is widely as possible. So you write a blog post, Tweet it, status it, and import it as a note in Facebook. Oh, and of course you syndicate it. So far, so good. But, that gives multiple access points to your readers, which means that any discussion sparked by your ideas is going to be diffused. For some people, this is not a problem — they generate long comment tails. For others, this is indeed a problem. If, for example, a “hot” post of mine generates, say, five responses, when you spread them across all of my platforms no one is talking to one another.

So that’s one problem.

Another problem, for those who are trying to monetize their work, is how to do this? How, for instance, do you monetize someone “retweeting” your work?

I don’t have answers, just the questions. And I am very certain these are not the only ones. 

Finally, the irony is not lost on me that one way of looking at this is that the immediate (twittering, statusing) is once again pushing out the slower (in this case blogs) — and this is exactly what blogging did to print and other one-way media.

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2 responses to “Tweets Squeezing Out Rants”

  1. Leo Dewey

    I agree entirely with Allison’s points, but would like to contribute further, without any offense intended toward you or other editorial Web site creators (Bloggers).

    Rather than news sources, for the most part I view Blogs as advocacy outlets: narrowly focused to the interests of their creators, and heavily weighted toward opinion and surrmise, rather than news. More and more, cooperating Blogs quote each other like TV reporters interviewing each other, neither adding measurably to the substance of the issue but only reinforcing their standing in the medium. As example, the conclusions you reached in your article are based mostly on the veracity of conclusions and observations expressed in Solis’ article. I have to wonder about the worth of a system that relies on Blinks (coined from Web Links as Blog is coined from Web Logs) to define Authority. The whole construct defies logic since there is no correlation between a link existing and a link visited or even if once visited that is a sign of agreement. I, like many, still rely on the old Webster definition of Authority “An accepted source of expert information or advice” where the emphasis is on “expert”. I don’t consider most “bloggers” to be experts unless they earn the distinction.

    As to the demise of newspapers in the face of all the Web-based competition, I think the anticipated funeral is premature. I say the same about Blogs in the face of the instant messaging rage. In the case of newspapers, which I’m sure you still read, their strength is drawn from their diversity of information and the ability to develop “experts” assigned to their “beats”. They are not just editorial pages but sources of news you can use, containing all of the five Ws in their reporting. Not many Blogs have staffs dedicated to actual news or pay much attention to the Ws. In the Case of Blogs, at least they represent a platform for informed opinion and debate, while any old twit can tweet.

    As far as “rarifying” your message by expressing it on several forums, I would think you might be better off sticking with posting the substance on a main site, only referencing it and linking to it on the others. Using the messaging sites as the hooks, but keeping the “fish” in your own pond. Once they visit your Blog, they’ll come back for more.

    In the mean time, when I read a magazine or newspaper article whose subject corresponds with your interests, I’ll visit Brad Rourke to get some worthwhile in-depth analysis, not Facebook, Twitter and the like. I believe, when the dust settles, all the various info streams will finally settle into a symbiotic whole we can all benefit from.

    Thanks again for a very interesting series of articles. Thought provoking.

  2. Allison Addicott

    I think you are getting it right, Brad. When will folks get tired of “platform pushing” and settle down? For some people (like me) tailgating a comment thread is akin to overhearing people at a fraternity party and trying to get a word in edgewise even when we are pretty sure the content is somehow lacking its top-game rhythm. But, who wants to exist only on the margins?
    Here again, more questions than answers within the ether era.
    be well,
    allison

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