Is Twitter killing the blogger stars?
On today’s Morning Browser, a few folks had an interesting conversation in the chat room about how Twitter is killing blog traffic and comments. The conversation started when Left Of Dial’s Frank Strovel openly pondered whether to renew his domain. You can read his short post from July 10 on his blog.
Frank cites waning passion, but in chat he also noted how his online conversation with others has almost completely gravitated to Twitter.
I’ve had ChristianGrantham.com for 10 years. During that 10 years, I’ve seen monthly charges of running the site go from over a $100 a month to about $7 a month. I’ve also seen friends move from one emerging online platform to another. Throughout that time, I’ve done the same, but I’ve always kept my domain, my place in the world wide web.
Even when I let months go by without adding content for whatever reason, my own domain has been my island in a sea of change. Whenever my passion for something arose, I’d turn to the blog and share it. Whenever that passion was shared through other emerging platforms, I’d pipe it into my domain.
Like many of us who started “blogging” online before we knew that’s what it was, we weren’t really sure who would care to read what we had to say. We found a ton of people that cared, and for a lot of people that become an irresistible drug. We all have our reasons for blogging, and some of them are sustainable and some simply are not.
What I’ve found over the past ten years that’s kept me going is to not allow traffic’s ups and downs to become a measure of validation for my passions, thoughts or observations. If I knew how to teach that to other people I’d be very rich.
I believe that Twitter, if anything, has helped the blog community tremendously. You’re able to quickly get an article out to your followers, and if it’s quality, they’ll re-tweet it to several others.. which creates traffic you otherwise might not have gotten.
Twitter (and Facebook) drive traffic to my blog. Also, some people are barely comfortable with the concept of “blog.” The concept of “twitter” confounds them — especially men.
I think that twitter has in some respects supplanted the communal, more-conversational aspect of the blogging community. You find a lot less back/forth in the comments on posts than you used to, it seems — at least I do. I think twitter has supplanted this “communal” aspect for more trivial/banal/conversational back-and-forth, while blogging remains essential for more substantive quality writing as always.
At least, that’s how I see the split in my own usage of the two mediums.
I don’t think Twitter is killing blogs but making them better. 140 characters is not enough to get down a complete though. I believe it makes you write more complete and thoughtful. Twitter is an instant gratification, the here and now. I don’t know of anybody who searches Google & clicks on a tweet but I’ll click through to a blog in a heartbeat.
What Twitter is replacing is RSS feeds. Do I dare say Twitter is just RSS 2.0? I bet more people know about and how to use Twitter before they know what a RSS is and how to use it.
It was this comment that really opened my eyes as to what Twitter could do, and will do, to social media. Written by an IT professorial type; in it’s own right a substantial blog post, and well worth the read.
But for the unfortunateness of it’s name, I feel Twitter would be much farther along than it already is.