James Blog: “Do you expect me to talk?”

Twitter: “No, Mr Blog. I expect you to die”

In a filmic parallel, microblog/micromedia phenomenon Twitter has taken a large, evil laser to the crotch of the blogosphere. As Twitter takes flight, the blog post rate, and level of blog interaction, is plummeting to the ground. The result is that blog authority, measured in the traditional blog-to-blog linkage by Technorati, has gone the way of property prices and Brian Cowen’s approval ratings.

Whereas in the past we blogged about something and awaited comments to waft in, that post-and-wait process has been rendered slow and obsolete by the likes of Twitter. Those that still post lengthy blog posts (and they are a dying breed) now solicit links and feedback via Twitter, and get it almost instantaneously. The serial tweeters seem to blog and link less as a result. Purely, unscientifically, from trawling my own reader, it seems that the quantity of blog posts is down, particularly from personal bloggers.

Solis, who wrote about this in an excellent post on TechCrunch, agrees:

“We are learning to publish and react to content in “Twitter time” and I’d argue that many of us are spending less time blogging, commenting directly on blogs, or writing blogs in response to blog sources because of our active participation in micro communities.”

It’s a micro migration that may have a positive effect on the remaining blogs. The criticism constantly levelled at blogs and bloggers is that they are largely the inane/insane ramblings of individual or networked cyber-soapbox nobodies. It would be ridiculous to state otherwise. There are nearly a million blog posts hurled noisily onto the pavement of the internet every day. Only a small percentage contain the diced carrot of quality, while most are pure bile.

But will we see Twitter kill off the more splenetic blog posts, as people turn to the Tweet rather than writing (slightly) more considered reactionary blog posts?

Why blog when you can tweet, after all? Why fly a lonely kite of a post into the blogosphere, hoping that someone will read and link to it, when you can tweet and be heard instantly, and actively cajole people into reading your every utterance. Where better to vent your ire than an always-connected community where hordes of other foaming loonies are waiting to respond to your every 140-character, straight-from-the-heart-ego ejaculation? Going into your dashboard to create a reciprocal link is so time-consuming, and yields a small return in comparison. Blogging is running five miles to get a ten-second endorphine rush. Twitter is popping a little happy pill. And in its transience lies some safety. Say something in Twitter, and after 20 more tweets, it’s largely buried in the middle of the heap somewhere. Twitter posts are not so searchable, so your most libellous and off-kilter missive has a shelf-life of perhaps an hour. A blog post is tattoo-like in comparison. It requires surgery to get rid of.

That’s not to say that everyone who gives up a blog as they take up Twitter is a card-carrying maniac with shelves full of Catcher in the Rye and a ‘thing’ for John Lennon.  Twitter is great if you don’t have time to blog. It’s a hell of a lot easier to pop out 10 words via Twitterfox than it is to format a blog post. It’s also more appropriate for a conversation, for intermittent to-and-fro and even for doing business. And you don’t have to listen to the Twitter crazies, either, you can use it as you see fit, follow who you want to follow. If the noise gets too much for you – *unfollow* – it’s that simple.

And, of course, many Twitterers are still blogging, and churning out very good material indeed, so the likely net result is that those that do persist with ‘long-form’ blogging will, comparitively, turn out higher quality material, saving their chaff, the material that was never really blog-grade, for Twitter. Blogs might claw back some of their credibility and authority as a result. Which is good.

Remember, there’s a reason why it’s called Twitter, although the meaning (below) of the word ‘twitter’ is being eroded rather rapidly by the online phenomenon.

Blog, on the other hand, is a truncation of ‘web log’. And the root of that, the log or record, was always more considered than twittering, which was never meant to be written down. That’s why the captain wrote the log, leaving the cabin boys to twitter amongst themselves. The only other option is that the ‘log’ in ‘web log’ meant a piece of dead wood, making Twitter the green shoot of new growth. But that’s an entire blog post of other metaphors.