Twitting Versus Blogging
Posted by Kyle Weems on December 10, 2008I like blogging. I do. However, I have a problem. I’ve got a Twitter account. There’s something about the 140-character limit micro-blog tool that makes it incredibly difficult to hold onto a concept long enough to form it into a five-paragraph essay, let alone a multi-page diatribe about how browser X’s implementation of CSS property Y is wrong.
It’s been an observed impact of the Internet that people generally are much more impatient when it comes to searching for data. If you can’t Google it or Wikipedia it in under five minutes, then the information doesn’t exist or isn’t worth knowing.
It seems to me at the very least that Twitter is doing the exact same thing to my ability to write at length about any topic. I could devise a narrative about my recent exploration of the topic of RDFa and talk at length of my conclusions regarding its impact on future web development… or I could come up with 140 characters or less to the effect of “RDFa is sort of like XFN. But not. At what point is extra semantic markup too much bloat?”
The trick is staving off the need for instant gratification in exchange for the fulfillment I get from a more carefully considered writing that covers the topic in more depth. I think that sums up Internet use in general these days.
Alright, fess up. How do you fight your Twitter addictions?
Hi Kyle,
Interesting.
Of course, RDFa is nothing like XFN (one is a generic syntax for handling _any_ vocabulary, whilst the other is a specific vocabulary) so already the Tweet that you proposed would be thoroughly misleading.
But it goes further, since the issue of bloat is ambiguous; are you saying that at 7 or 8 attributes RDFa is bloated, or are you saying that given there are so many Microformats about, at some point it must become better to devise a generic syntax like RDFa, and beat the bloat?
This illustrates one of the problems with using Twitter for these kinds of opinions; it obviates the need for coming to a proper conclusion, and it allows us to simply throw out questions that seem to imply that there is great depth behind them, and the Tweet is merely the conclusion.
But of course that is rarely the case, since if it was, the person would have written a blog-post rather than a Tweet.
So my vote would be for the blog-post over the Tweet; tell us your conclusions about RDFa and the future of web development, and avoid the ambiguous aphorisms. (I mean Tweets.)
Then we can discuss your conclusions properly, which is after all, how knowledge develops.
All the best,
Mark Birbeck
http://internet-apps.blogspot.com/
@Mark – I believe I’ve just been -served-.
I agree that RDFa is by and large not similar to XFN in any fashion other than the two can be used to define relationships. But with the initial tutorials on RDFa seeming to almost always involve the FOAF syntax, it’s clear that a major current use of RDFa is XFN on steroids.
Regarding the bloat issue, I feel that the amount of semantic markup that’s considered “must have” for online documents seems to be rising at quite a pace. Make sure to have your hCards and hCalendars, put in your XFNs, and now make sure to add as much RDFa as possible, and so forth.
I agree that a future point where RDFa was the exclusive method used to describe all these semantic situations (contact info, events, relationships, etc) seems like a step in the right direction. It’ll be interesting to see if the existing Microformat community agrees with that concept.
Of course Twitter is no replacement for even a well thought out blog comment, let alone a blog post. Unless, of course, you are genuinely talking about something that requires no more than 140 characters to exhaust the topic. However, I’ll admit that it’s tempting to skip the time-sink of a full blog entry in favor of a quick tweet on a topic.
Never fear, though, I’ll gladly throw out my observations about RDFa in a forthcoming post which will be much more effective at highlighting what will doubtlessly be my misunderstandings regarding it’s purpose and use.
I agree with your sentiments exactly.
When I think of a blog post, I think of an in-depth essay, using no less than three or four level 3 or three headings, illustrative images, and a list of links at the end to more information or sources.
But when does a person find the time to write all of that, and to do it purposefully? That is, in my opinion, my ultimate goal in blogging, but that never happens.
Instead of documenting my forays into jQuery or Microformats or the vagaries of object oriented PHP, I end up using my blog to store the things that are too long to post on Twitter. Commentaries on YouTube videos, or other such diversions.
Twitter is easy, because I can share and discuss information fast, without having to sculpt a PHD thesis on whatever subject I happen to be interested in.