There's going to be another fight. It's not the VLE vs the PLE. This time it's whether Twitter is killing blogging. Strewth, it's like waiting for a bus. You stand around for ages and then suddenly two big debates come along at once. I was only on the periphery of the Twitter vs blogging debate when I chaired a F-ALT (Fringe ALT-C) session late at night over at the Contact Theatre in Manchester last week. The antagonists were Josie Fraser, who argued for the merits of Twitter, and Graham Attwell, who claimed that Twitter was quite simply not as deep and meaningful as blogging. The handbags were out. There were no fisticuffs, but lots of finger pointing and gesticulating was witnessed as like two sumo wrestlers, they circled each other in the sawdust (stop mixing your metaphors - Ed). The final vote was a resounding victory for .... the abstainers. Now, sitting on the fence is not a normal occupation for regular F-ALTers - they are normally quite opinionated. But this debate obviously divided them. And, lo and behold, a similar debate was also emerging online when I arrived home. Grainne Conole, Matt Lingard and others were weighing in on Cloudworks to debate whether edubloggers were being sidetracked into using Twitter and beginning to neglect their blogging. One of the questions is: Now you are using Twitter, is your blogging activity tailing off? Do check out the Cloudworks site - it's a fascinating discussion.My answer of course, is no, in my experience, the two can live side by side. My blog output if anything is increasing, and Twitter is a useful tool to make the community aware of those new posts, and it encourages me to write more when I see Twitter driving larger numbers of readers to my blog. So try RSS, I hear someone say. Well, RSS is a great tool but difficult to set up sometimes, and not everyone understands it. However, more and more people are turning to Twitter as a means of short messaging, because it's relatively simple to use. And the community is growing, with new tools such as TweepML, useful lists of people to follow can be created and communities quickly grow around themes of interest.
I believe that there is a synergy between blogging and Twitter. They are in my own personal web at least, becoming interdependent. My Twitter stream is incorporated into this blog (in the right hand column) and Twitter can be used to link to this blog. Take one away, and the other would be somewhat diminished. The debate will continue, and we shall see whether Twitter kills blogging, or whether the two can live comfortably together. So is Twitter killing blogging? Is Twitter killing RSS? Will there be a murder trial?
Related posts:
Is Twitter killing the blog? No. (Terry Wassall)
Is Twitter killing blog comments? (Danny Brown)
Is Twitter killing blogs and blogging? (Mark Evans)
Is Twitter killing blogging? (Chris Eden)
Is Twitter killing RSS? (Jeff Nolan)
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