About Twitter and attention

I’m starting to think that bloggers who heavily tweet are shortchanging themselves.

I saw Michelle Blanc earlier and she mentioned that she’s going to be on Tout le monde en parle, a talk show here in Quebec. I hadn’t heard and told her so, so she said she had tweeted it, and jokingly asked if I read her twitter stream.

The thing is, I do read it. I read it along with 400 or so other people I follow, but I obviously can’t read them all, all the time. It becomes overwhelming. This made me realize that people probably don’t read my tweets that often either.

Twitter is the new community participation, but if people are as good at reading tweets as I am, I’m probably hurting myself a bit by participating a lot there. Chris made a point of this in a talk he did at Podcasters Across Borders, saying he was winning because he blogged so much, even though so many people had quit for Twitter. Not only that, but people don’t link to tweets, so by tweeting, you shortchange your ideas of link equity, too (and even if people did link, you wouldn’t own the links).

The conclusion this leads me too is that the smart ones who know what’s up should still be blogging. The time is now because those that aren’t devoted to it are quitting, reducing competition for readers’ attention. It only makes sense, right?


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5 responses to “About Twitter and attention”

  1. Harold Jarche Avatar

    Twitter complements my blog. I post stuff that wouldn’t get on my blog and cover subjects outside my professional interests. I don’t see it as an either/or situation. I also don’t care if I miss tweets. If they were really important, they would get sent directly to me 😉

  2. TZ Avatar

    will we see more IOYH blog posts then?

  3. David LaMorte Avatar

    Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe instead of writing a blog post about a topic that could be boiled down to a tweet should never have become a blog post. Sometimes when I read a blog post I wish it was more to the point. “Maybe this could turn into survival of the pity.” (I’m going to copyright that)

    Maybe this comment should have been a tweet.

  4. Dave Delaney Avatar

    I love microblogging, but I think it needs to be done (if you decide to) to compliment your blog. Twitter is a great source of traffic to my blog, but I’m not even close to giving up on blogging.

    My biggest concern with Twitter is the inability to archive our tweets, and to export our followers and followees. So we depend on the Twitter (company) managed cloud, and we hope that our tweets are forever accessible by us and our families.

    There’s also that off chance that you wrongly get accused as a spammer and your account gets locked. That’s not much fun: http://urlzen.com/r8

    Nice to see you blogging again Mr. Smith.
    D

  5. Julien Avatar

    thank you very much mr. delaney. nice to be back. 😉

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