Can Facebook, Twitter and blogs play nicely together? Can they co-exist without one sending the other to their Internet grave? Continue reading
Article first published as The Blog is Alive and Well on Technorati.
If you ask me, the last two lines of “An empire gives way” an article in the June 24th issue of The Economist, about the state of the blogosphere, sounds ominous. The piece cites research from media-research firm, Nielsen, on how traffic to blog-hosting sites, Blogger and WordPress, are stagnating and how by contrast, Facebook’s traffic grew by 66% last year and Twitter’s by 47%. Okay, I get it–but to be honest– I was alarmed by the article’s projection: “Where will that end? Perhaps in a single, hugely long blog posting about the death of blogs.”
Can Facebook, Twitter and blogs play nicely together? Can they co-exist without one sending the other to their Internet grave? I think so. I think the forms compliment one another and feed off of each other very well.
Blogger, Cory Doctorow, writes, “I still blog 10-15 items a day, just as I’ve done for 10 years now on Boing Boing. But I also tweet and retweet 30-50 times a day. Almost all of that material is stuff that wouldn’t be a good fit for the blog – material I just wouldn’t have published at all before Twitter came along. But a few of those tweets might have been stretched into a blogpost in years gone by, and now they can live as a short thought.”
I share links to material I find valuable on Facebook and use the comment field to make a brief point or to ask a question and initiate a discussion. On Twitter, I often re-tweet when I’m reading an article on a blog or online newspaper. It’s a quick way to say to Twitter followers, here’s something I think you’ll like. But when it comes to covering a topic in more detail, there’s still nothing in my opinion that beats the blog post.
Continue reading “The Blog is Alive and Well”