Blogs vs Microblogs
I’ve shared my thoughts about microblogs vs proper blogs a few times over the years but even after more than 20 years of blogging and more than 15 years of microblogging I still haven’t landed on a definitive position.
It’s evident that the era of Twitter has rendered blogs almost exclusively for more niche segments. The ability of microblogs to deliver almost instant readership and feedback to a piece of writing gives their authors relentless dopamine shots that keeps them around for much longer periods.
Blogs allow for more verbose and nuanced posts but when microblogs allow for that to happen as well, that makes you question the necessity of blogs other than the more obvious ones such as easier indexing, categorization, search, and discovery.
I guess it’s a matter of choosing between delivering more complete thoughts on a faster conversational platform and putting them down on your own space that you can have better control over.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen had something like Pownce had prevailed instead but that would require an alternate world in which the public chose Gowalla over Foursquare. Simplicity seems more likely to win over more complete or elaborate executions in our world after all.
