How Facebook and Twitter are killing my blog
by Mark on Dec.19, 2008, under general
There once was a time that I posted multiple entries in a day on my blog, and on a regular basis. My most active month on the blog resulted in 30 posts. That was December 2005, the end of my most active year on my blog, averaging almost 19 posts per month (ppm). I slowed down a bit in 2006, averaging just over 11 ppm, and I averaged 14 ppm in 2007. So far in 2008, I have averaged just under 9 ppm. Since may, I have not had more than 7 posts in a single month. December is almost over, I’ve averaged only 2.5 posts per month since September, and that includes this post! I have managed to always have at least 2 ppm since my first post on February 28, 2003.
Then came October of last year. All of a sudden my wife is on Facebook trying to communicate with current and former students. I decided that if my wife had finally bit the bullet on this, I might as well, too. Pretty quickly after setting up my profile on Facebook, I jumped onto Twitter. Between being able to tweet from my cell phone and getting Twitter to update my Facebook status, I had quick access to microblog on-the-go. Unfortunately for my blog, that meant not sitting down and hammering out posts.
This post is itself an example of this. I originally started writing this post in September, but it had sat untouched as a draft since September 25th. Why? Because it was much more convenient to microblog on Twitter, Facebook, Yammer, BrightKite and TwitPic, than it was to open up my WordPress admin page and finish the post. I even found it easier to just share the interesting things I had read in Google Reader, or post links to other cool things using delicious.
Of course, it didn’t help that I was spending eight hours in class every Saturday and an additional five to ten hours per week on homework. So, I guess in addition to Facebook and Twitter, I can blame my lack of blog activity on grad school, too.
We’ll see if I can bring the activity up a little bit during my short break (only to see the activity plummet again in mid-January as the new quarter starts). We’ll see how that goes.
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December 22nd, 2008 on 5:50 am
Grad school is obviously going to limit activity on the blog, and there is really nothing to be done about it. Tweets and status updates, though, need not be seen as supplanting the blog. First off, not everyone reads micro-blog posts intensely. That is, we don’t read each one to remember the contents later. There’s more of a general keeping-in-touch air about the whole concept. What’s more, you should see your micro-posts as ideas for potential posts here. For instance, your tweet that you made up your mind to buy a TV turn into a post about why you picked it and why now. That some or all of us know something happened does not mean a fuller story would bore us.
Again, with class and homework it is understandable that you cannot post as often as you like, but I for one would hate to see your blog wither on the vine.