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Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

Just saw this tweet from @kevinrose on Twitter:

hmm, Pownce (notes/files/links), Digg (stories), Twitter (short updates), FriendFeed (aggregated comments), do I still need a blog?

Just minutes before I saw this tweet I was having a discussion with a colleague that is thinking about shutting down his blog altogether in an attempt to regain focus on the things he considers important.

In my previous post, when I said I was evaluating how to keep this blog up as a reflection of what I’m about, I have to be honest that shutting this blog down was also one of my options. It’s been 5 years since I started it, and it’s been a good run, but it doesn’t completely feel like a good fit for me anymore.

It seems there’s a better way to share information. I hardly read RSS feeds anymore. I get all my links and information from tweets. All the blogs I truly care about tweet links to their posts, so RSS reading has almost fallen by the wayside for me as well.

So, you tell me. Am I jumping the gun here, or have blogs as we know them begun to lose their relevancy?

Posted in Discussions, Interweb, Social Media, Technology | Comments

Bite-sized blogging

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

As we were driving in to work, my wife mentioned that she had noticed I hadn’t updated this blog recently. A quick look showed that yes, it’s been one day shy of a month since I’ve posted anything.

“But, I’ve been writing and doing lots of posting,” I thought to myself. And, I realized that I have, just not here. I’ve done a lot of pontificating over the past month on Twitter, spent a brief amount of time trying to get what the hype is about Plurk and/or FriendFeed.

I think the reason why I feel that I’ve done so much over the past month is the immediacy of the microblogging medium. I like writing concise, compact statements that say everything that needs to be said. I also like getting fairly immediate feedback. Rarely do any of my posts on this site garner any comments, yet on Twitter I can start a detailed conversation pretty readily and get multiple followers to participate in it.

I also noticed this morning that I have almost as many followers on Twitter as I have subscribers to this blog. My thoughts are reaching nearly as large an audience, and given my follower growth rate, I imagine that in a couple of weeks I’ll have surpassed my feed subscribers by an appreciable amount.

Am I giving up this blog? Certainly not. I’ve spent too many years cultivating this site and crafting content to just abandon it. I still think there’s value in continuing to blog in chunks larger than 140 characters as well. I do think I need to rethink the format of this blog (yet again) to keep it fresh and relevant. Are there any blogging trends you’re noticing out there now that microblogging is taking hold?

Posted in Anecdotes, Discussions, Interweb, Social Media, Technology | Comments

Smart repackaging works to sell Hot Tubs

Monday, April 28th, 2008

I’ve been hearing songs by the Foxboro Hot Tubs on XM for a month or so now and have really been digging their style. It’s good stuff - a new take on garage rock, although reminiscent of a number of bands that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Yesterday I heard the DJ announce that the band was actually Green Day. This, of course, finally accounted for the fact that the lead singer sounded so much like Billie Jo Armstrong.