Online Media Cultist

There’s been a good deal of teeth gnashing of late in blogospheric circles about the increasing challenge of maintaining relationships and keeping track of information given the number of popular “micro-blogging,” social networking, and other kinds of “short form” communications platforms now in vogue with the hyper-connected set.

It’s become a matter of trying to find a sort of communications sanity for some, I suppose. Jason Calacanis, for one, declared “Facebook bankruptcy”, which means, we might imagine, that he’s going to stop using the popular social networking site, or at least ignore all of the friend requests and invitations and such that he’s been receiving. And that was on the heels of his shutting down comments on his long running blog!

Others are getting worn down by the prospect of trying to keep up with services such as Twitter as well as competitors Pownce and Jaiku. Each time you sign up for a new service, for instance, you have to try to find your friends and add them, and then communicate with them (and keep up with said communications) on yet another platform. Throw in Facebook and MySpace and LinkedIn and half a dozen others (ever check out I’m In Like With You.com? It’s super fun) and the challenge doth mount.

This sense of weariness comes mainly from “early adopters” (people who like to sign up for new-fangled “web 2.0″ services to check them out) who have more things to early adopt than ever before.

Online communication is evolving rapidly, partly because it has so many different ways to take place now, from MySpace to Twitter, from GTalk to AIM. The line between “publishing” and “communicating” is blurring. Are you talking to your friends, or to an audience of people interested in your opinion? It wasn’t so long ago, back in the early ’90s when I was in college, when communicating online meant e-mailing friends down at the “computer pod.”

Steve Rubel takes on this topic intelligently today in a piece called When Less is More and More is Less. He’s finding that publishing to an audience via Twitter has allowed him to change the way he thinks about and uses his popular blog, Micro Persuasion. He analogizes today’s web as more Arena Football than NFL: faster and more mobile. Micro-blogging and social networks in his view have helped to bring this transformation.

Therefore, straight-up, old fashioned blogging, like what you’re seeing right here on OMC, may become the bastion for “longer form” communications, even if “longer form” means a few hundred words versus the rapid fire exchanges of Twitter!

And perhaps over time blogging will be seen as a more permanent and lasting publishing form than it is today. That is, micro blogging and social networking will be the place for transient, spur of the moment sharing and chatting, whereas blogging is a (somewhat) more formal place to introduce thoughts and ideas and information and then discuss them with commenters in a permanently archived and searchable environment.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 10:55 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Tags: blogging, social networking, twitter