The "whither twitter" debate is irrelevant. Evidence hinting that its popularity may be short-lived is not hard to find, but I wouldn't place any money on it either way. It's just too hard to predict what will take hold in the ever-shifting sands of the semi-arid intellectual desert that some still call cyberspace. I doubt tweets will go away any time soon, and I'm not sure that they should go away, despite the legs my "Twitter is Evil" parody have acquired.
Rather than dwell on the merits or shortcomings of the 140-character medium, I'm more interested in doing my part to improve the signal-to-noise ration in the blogosphere. The Slow Blog Manifesto has been around for three years now, but it hardly seems inappropriate to offer a few comments on the concept at this juncture.
The first tenet of Vancouver tech consultant Todd Sieling's manifesto is medicine for what ails this hyper-mediated culture of instant-analysis:
Slow Blogging is a rejection of immediacy. It is an affirmation that not all things worth reading are written quickly, and that many thoughts are best served after being fully baked and worded in an even temperament.
Überblogger Andrew Sullivan had a few words to say in a post
... in November's Atlantic magazine called "Why I Blog." He said in an interview posted on the magazine's web site that during the election, his readers became so addicted to his stream of posts that he sometimes set his blog to post automatically so he could go to lunch. When he took two days off to make sense of "the whole Sarah Palin thing," his audience flipped, thinking he was dead or silenced.
"You can't stop," Mr. Sullivan said in the online interview. "The readers act as if you've cut off their oxygen supply, and they just flap around like a goldfish out of water until you plop them back in."
I can only fantasize about such an audience for the Island of Doubt.Wouldn't it be wonderful to be so popular? But as Andy Revkin wrote at his Dot Earth blog recently, maybe we should all just take deep breath and stop churning out short, sharp and sweet posts. The fiasco that followed Jake Tapper's post on Hillary Clinton's remarks on the economics of climate change proves just how difficult it is to ensure that a lengthy blog post doesn't leave the wrong impression. Compressing the message to just a few words hastily posted only exaggerates that risk.
Yes, there will be uses for timely alerts, and maybe Twitter is filling that niche. But most of the time, most of us do not need quick hits. We need context, not sound bites. We need reasoned argument, not pithy polemics. We need authority and attribution, not celebrations of celebrity.
Since the beginning, I have tried not to post too hastily. In part that's a reflection of my training as a journalist and the reality of working without an editor's net. In fact, for the first few months, I wrote just one post a week, and had my wife look it over first. But the impulse to be among the first to comment on a new paper or development is nearly irresistible and I feel it just as much as the next blogger.
The only way out is to stop trying to be popular. If we're lucky, and good with words, every now and then a few of us may achieve a zen-like moment of clarity that finds a sizable readership.
I hereby vow to make a more concerted effort to embrace the fundamentals of slow blogging. I won't promise never to write a quick note drawing your attention to something someone else has written that requires little in the way of qualification or introduction, but I will do my best to ensure that the vast majority of what appears in this space is well researched and carefully considered. I might be a little late to the game, but I'm not interesting in winning.
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i got to this post via a link someone posted on Twitter. i reckon that still shows how Twitter is an exciting channel for Internet users.
I also came here via Twitter. I suspect the "I'm now drinking coffee" and the cliquish side of quitter will die off and it will shift towards it's strength which is as a feed to real content.
The fast and the slow will work together.
I also arrived from Twitter. Agreed there is a place for both. Quality will not be usurped quantity.
The reason I use twitter is because I find long-winded blogs like these that I can skip-read.
"Utility is the measure of content. Speed, depth, persistence are all factors of utility. I am going to focus on depth."
That was just this blog entry in <140 characters.
A.
For me, this just sums up why multi-author blogs are the future of blogging. It's difficult for a single blogger to reliably sustain both quality and audience size. Having several bloggers join forces on one blog makes much more sense in terms of cost, efficiency, promotion, etc.
As for Twitter vs. blogging, the two are complementary technologies in my opinion. Twitter is great for spreading links to blog posts, and a very useful way of promoting my site. In fact in essence, Twitter performs a similar role for me to an RSS feed.
Maybe the popularity of short, snappy, jolts of information is that we're cruising the blogosphere when we should be busy at our jobs. Tweet that.
Bittman's Twitter sent me here. First time at your site. Twitter's a great pointer. But your argument about slow bogging is spot on.
Twitter also brought me here. I view it as a linking platform to draw more attention to my slow blog and keep up with other slow blogs. I do confess, however, that I'm becoming hooked on the craft of the sound bite.
I got here through RSS. Good luck with the slow blogging. The twitter-slow blog axis reminds me of the difference between trivia and information: information is data that you use to make actual decisions, while trivia is data just for the sake of data. Blogs and twitter might be ephemeral fun for news junkies, but the deep blog concept might produce something worth reading in the longer term.
No one will want tweets as part of their search results, while a good slow blog entry could be worth the search.
[got here from Bittman's tweet]
"I won't promise never to write a quick note drawing your attention to something someone else has written that requires little in the way of qualification or introduction, "
You should promise! That's what Twitter's for!
"but I will do my best to ensure that the vast majority of what appears in this space is well researched and carefully considered. "
Good job! That's what blogging's for!
Is there a blog dedicated to the lengthy comparison of apples to oranges? Folks who dismiss Twitter miss the point of Twitter. Those who think Twitter will kill full-article blogs miss the point of a well-written one.
Some events are great for thought-out reflection and analysis. Other things are meant for not much more than a shout out. Both are important slices of life that personally I think bring value to the online voices.
I like the idea of the slow-blogging manifesto, but I also think the Ramones proved that some things are better, faster.
Also found this through twitter. You have to understand, twitter is for aggregation. Imagine an RSS feed that consisted solely of the most meaningful things spotted by the smartest people you know.
Now you get it.
Twitter is not for content it is for directing us to content...
We are such an instant gratification society that some people get confused as to what its real purpose is.
I think long form blogging can force more complete analysis, and certainly has the potential to replace newspaper op-ed, and various critical essays. Twitter seems to still be discovering it's purpose. I originally liked the idea of Twitter being the poetry of blogs. Forced concise wording, which packs meaning into these limited characters. From what I have seen that has not caught on. If it is a place to link and reference, that is also interesting. Still content and opinion can better be combined in longer blogs. Thank you for your post. This is an evolving question.
Believe it or not, I didn't find your blog on Twitter, I can't really say how I landed here. It started with a search on "the future of blogs" and ended with a search for intelligent life in the blogosphere.
I'm happy to report that I think I found some here. I really enjoyed your article on slow blogging. Like you, my background is Eng Lit and my career was technical writing. I don't know how to do sound bytes or tumble blogging. Some of it reminds me of when I was an undergrad (back in the seventies) and we all thought we'd be James Joyce or Kerouac because stream of consciousness was so "easy" to write. We were morons.
Cheers, James, you've restored my faith (for today).
thanks
fyi - I found your post through that ancient rss tech.
I have seen longer and shorter postings, often the longer ones are much more interesting and useful.