"Globally, fewer people are posting to their blogs each week than go to the Minnesota State Fair..."
from a review of Technorati's "State of the Blogosphere 2008" at Read/Write Web. Although RWW puts some of the numbers into perspective, their account isn't as pessimistic as this quote might make it seem. It does raise some interesting questions about how microblogging sites like Facebook and Twitter affect the popularity of blogging.
Well, for sure I do less chit-chat blogging. Twitter works wonders for that. It seems more appropriate to put the chit-chat stuff on Twitter. I feed it into the sidebar of my "big" blog, but Twitter saves me from 2-sentence posts to Upstate, and it also forces me to be succinct about minutia. Latest case in point: today's tweet re roadkilled CNY skunks.
Yeah, I'm not sure how to feel about it, though. Those of us who blog (and I only can include myself marginally in that category this year) do what you do, I think, and add it to our mecologies. But I don't know that the opposite is true--that people who have more than 140 characters to write will scale up to blogs. Not that they necessarily should, I suppose.
Sometimes what starts as chit-chat on the blog ends up as something more. What starts as chit-chat on Twitter stays chit-chat. But that may just be me, too.
c
I think you're right, and I hadn't thought about that. Sam & I exchanged several remarks a day or so ago about the possibility of naming one's child Dam if one had the surname Wright, Strait, or Skippy. And those remarks were as extended a conversation as I've ever had on Twitter. As for whether Twitter would encourage more extensive blogging: with you, I doubt it.
I think that those who use Twitter for messaging are either also bloggers or are people who want to communicate via typed message rather than voice mail. I don't know that Twitter has brought down the numbers of bloggers out there ( and I feel so old saying that).
Like Becky, I tend to use Twitter and Facebook for chitchat and for hanging out with my pals. I sometimes blog from Facebook, but with no tagging, it's a drag, so I usually go back to Typepad to post.
My blogging is constantly changing due to my personal and professional circumstances, and I suspect that it's the same for others. While I may not be posting daily on my own blog, I have spent a week getting my Lit students set up with their own blogs and my basic writers with a course blog. And then there are the folks like Clancy and Jonathan or Jeff and Jenny who have gotten married, had babies and new jobs--all wonderful, to be sure, but time consuming.