Tweeting and blogging

How many more Twitter and... posts, I wonder?

Jeff Jarvis is worrying that as he is tweeting more, he is blogging less, and so failing to develop ideas (or have them developed through comments) into something more enduring than a passing thought. He thinks Twitter may lead to wwa or, if not world wide amnesia, to his at least. Liz Lawley comments that as far back (!) as 2003 she lamented the transience of topics in blog posts. I suppose this might be caricatured as the academic's counter to the journalist's (now academic) point of view. But even if individual posts are transient, the organisational and archival possibilities of blogs makes them (for me) more powerful than tweet streams. Link in a tweet stream. Then what? Remember it? Probably not. You have to do some more processing, even if it's just tagging it, to make it your own. At least tagged posts can be retrieved again without sequential scrolling. Twitter needs more organisational tools if it's to have any durability. And then you wonder whether that misses the point. Do 140-character, impromptu posts really merit such organisation.

Anyway, much as Stephen Fry has not stopped tweeting, so Jeff Jarvis hasn't stopped blogging, with a lovely post yesterday proposing a Gadget of the Month Club to enable cash-strapped geeks to try out new tech as soon as it comes to market. Great idea, although as some comments point out it sits uncomfortably with manufacturer/operator lock ins. You'd have to repeat synch your data (with the risk that synching wouldn't always be complete) or carry around an up-to-date SIM, assuming it would be accessible from all devices.

(As an aside, having linked to Liz Lawley's blog for this post I came across her account of Westin hotels (Seattle, of course) making amazingly smooth use of Twitter to engage with customers.)