Levels of blogging

February 11, 2008

It seems that over the last year or so, the way that we publish information on the internet has slowly been broken down into various ‘genres’ by the tools we use and the output they produce. I’m thinking here primarily about the emergence of text/image based genres, such as microblogging, nanoblogging, tumblelogging and so on. These are matched by other media types, such as audioblogging or podcasting, vlogging, moblogging or linkblogging, but it is the micro-formats that have grabbed my attention lately.

I’ve tried Twitter a couple of times before, although each time I just didn’t quite see how I could make any use of it, it just seems too basic. It feels like a very transient medium, with conversations constantly occurring whether you are watching or not and very little chance of catching up with anything you may have missed. For all you know, the most enlightening conversation could have gone on while you were sleeping. There’s just no way to tell unless you want to wade through hundreds or thousands of individual tweets; a far cry from the easily accessed archives of ‘traditional’ blogs (by this I mean the Movable Types and WordPresses etc). What I was overlooking is that this speed and flow is what makes Twitter (and its competitors, such as Pownce, Jaiku and Cromple) valuable. You don’t need to listen to the entire conversation. You can tune in and out as you need. The important bits will still make it to you via direct d messages, @ messages and by tracking terms. With enough people to follow, Twitter quickly becomes background conversation you can dip in and out of as you like. The cool thing is that you choose the people you want to listen to and you can easily involve yourself in the conversation.
At least, that seems to be the Australian way of Twittering – very much like idle chatter. Elsewhere, Twitter seems to be used a little bit more sparingly, updated often only when someone has something more or less meaningful to say, rather than just ‘good morning’. Twitter also becomes a very useful resource if you think that your followers can help you out: just pop the question and you never know who will reply with an answer. So, in realising this, I’ve come back to Twitter with a more open mind. I’ve got a list of people that I’m following (very few of who I know personally) that provide a fairly constant stream of chatter and I occasionally weigh into conversations or propose questions myself. I’ve learned to live without the conversations I miss, and also to deal with the distractions during the day of people advising me of what their lunch consists of, or when they go to bed. It’s also a stream of notifications, with interesting things on the web being constantly linked to.

Tumblelogging, on the other hand, I am still just experimenting with. I’ve signed up with Tumblr and have quickly realised how this form of communication fills the gaps between the nanoblogging of Twitter and traditional blogging. Tumblelogging can remove the pressure of headings, commentary, layout and many design concerns in favour of the content. Tumblelogging becomes a process of posting what you’ve created or found quickly, without processing it at length beforehand. This makes tumblelogs feel like a list of discoveries or thoughts, more complex than Twitter’s banter, but less constructed and worked on than traditional blog posts. What has become apparent after browsing some of the most popular tumblelogs, is that this middle ground is not a replacement for either of the other formats. Those tlogs that get into too much detail feel like they would benefit by the features offered by a full-blown blogging platform, while those that are too brief do not always feel like the effort was worth it and could be instead squeezed into 140 characters to be digested when and if initially read.

Which leads us to what is typically thought of as blogging. With the advent of all these new services and ways to publish and communicate, the traditional blog still has its purpose and place. If you want an in-depth post, review or article, then a blog is where you are going to find it. Blogs also provide a solid history of what else has been published that is categorised by dates, topics and tags. The layout and feel of a blog also work to give you a sense of the author or to complement to content with the blog itself representing the intent of the author, in addition to the content.

I’m left feeling that each one of these platforms complements, rather than competes, with the others and are further complemented by yet more services, such as del.icio.us linkblogs. To this end, I’ve put my Twitter and Tumblr feeds on my blog in the sidebar. The intention is for the Twitter feed to be an indication of what’s going on right now and what conversations I’m involved in, while the Tumblr feed acts as a stream-of-consciousness feed populated with things I stumble over online. The content of the blog contains the (allegedly) more thought-out content.

If want to follow me on any of these levels, my WordPress blog is here, my Twitter page is here and my Tumblr page is here.

I’d be interested to know how other people use these services and, more importantly, how you combine these, so please feel free to let me know in the comments below.

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