Return of the Blogger: Blogging vs Microblogging

This blog has been a shameful posting desolace for the past few months (all the way from March) and although I could instantly come up with a plethora of explanations for my lack of posting, only two of them have the validity to deserve being mentioned here.

The first one is my decision to successfully complete the academic year at the faculty in order to be able to go study abroad - for which purpose a considerable amount of free time had to be sacrificed and blogging was one for many activities that were thrown into the basket of temporary irrelevance.

The second one is partially related to the first reason, at least as far as the perceived lack of time for blogging is concerned, though in all other aspects it really tends to question the purpose of blogging and forces one to reexamine this once well respected activity that has turned into yet another Internet fad via a process of "mainstreaming".

To call out the culprit by name, I am naturally talking about Twitter - or better yet - twittering. Though this will inevitably turn into an Internet fad as well (according to El Mano it already has), I strongly doubt that Twitter or any similar service such as FriendFeed and Jaiku would lose their appeal to me due to a more convenient way of expressing myself like it happened with blogging for a while.

Round one

My main issue between tweeting and blogging was that the former became not complementary to the latter but a supplement for it instead.
The newly formed relation between the two certainly seemed quite convenient for a certain period of time, especially when I was focused on passing all eleven exams I had left, though as time passed I gradually began realizing how limiting this short form of communication can be and decided to do an above-mentioned evaluation in the form of a long anticipated blog post...

I admit that I'm predominantly twittering these days, and there are several other-than-time-based reasons why I take it to my liking: it shifts my focus from a coherent, delayed type of writing to an instantaneous one where the mood bursts have an opportunity to stand out (which undoubtedly leaves a lot of room for sociological analysis and experiments).

Beside the possibility to express your mood, a network of users sending short instant text messages offers an excellent information flow without any obstacles or regulation, which is an absolute blessing for cell-based group communication with great potential to use the (mobile or any other device) distributed information to your own liking, for example creating ad hoc meetings.

Communication Trends

If I had to find a suitable parallel, the most accurate one would probably be comparing YouTube vlogging and Stickam with a pinch of Seesmic. The interesting thing to point out here is the nonlinear development that both text and video communication of his type had - on the Internet, video messaging didn't evolve from text-based services but instead had a side by side evolution and only recently merged with it. On the other hand, they both had a similar pattern of development: from focusing on larger chunks of information towards satisfying more and more instantaneous communication needs, finally leading to the smallest acceptable information amounts.
Another related trend that I've noticed is the constant need for services that encompass all other existing services and aggregate their information. What becomes of this development is a horizontal order in which the sources of information are seemingly dictated by the new emerging aggregators who in fact act predominantly upon demand.

Round two

Since the discussed minimization trend has all but gone unnoticed, various fancy terms and definitions that reflect understanding of this development have been coined for such services during the last two years. Probably the most suitable (though a tad pretentious) is microblogging - as Anand Rajaraman defines it, "microblogging is semi-synchronous publish-subscribe messaging", according to which services like the Indian SMS GupShup dwarf Twitter with their enormous user base.
The inevitable debate about blogging and microblogging that sprang up as a result of dilemmas similar to my own is a pretty ancient (measured in Internet time) one and I doubt there is much that hasn't been said about it yet, which leaves me to elaborate my own standpoint in order to avoid any repetitions.

To continue with comparison of the two, a brief reflection on my past blogging posts is required.
Things that I would be blogging about a year ago, for example running, are now included in my twitter updates. This means that microblogging can successfully supplement the diary function of a blog - be it the pure facts-stating part or more private observations as well.

Twittering is perhaps less thoughtful and reflective though the limited 140-character message size that causes it at the same time pushes one towards increasingly compressed messaging which in return successfully counters the lack of above mentioned thoughtfulness and reflectiveness. The micro version of blogging therefore remains far less time-consuming and straight to the point while staying just as personal as real blogging.

Ding Ding Ding!

Even though this seemed to be a strong rational argument in favor of microblogging at first, I later began realizing that the worshiped micro platform of communication is only able to realize one array of needs someone like me might have. Forcing thoughts to be expressed in only one way brings development in terms of creativeness of expression in that particular format but neglects all the others. It is as if only one branch of a tree would be given a chance to grow and blossom while all others would eventually dry up - the problem of this is that the single branch only has a limited direction, reach and capacity of growth, no matter how big and beautifully complex it gets, thus wasting tree's resources that would be more beneficial elsewhere.

Though that may seem self-evident, I never gave it much thought before I started writing this blog post - another reason in favor of blogging. In general, I've come to a conclusion that services should adapt to forms of expression and not vice versa. Their users are then given the possibility to do the opposite and bing these service to their creative limits.

An interesting idea for the latter that I had when looking at the silly amount of fictional Star Wars characters as users on Twitter was to start a highly entertaining series in its microblogging narrative form, a step above the fake Richard Dawkins (who unfortunately got deleted after several complaints) or Fake Steve Jobs in the blogging sphere, though the most suitable thing to compare it to comes from videoblogging: the LonelyGirl15 series. While we have yet to see any such use of microblogging in practice, it surely gives some much needed backing to arguments for sustainable micropublishing.


The Loser and the Winner

After all conclusions that I have already drawn, the real winner of this clash is anyone who realizes that there actually is no feud between blogs and microblogs since they represent two different approaches to communication with the possibility of blending through old-fashioned service mutations or the horizontal order approach.

I was a loser in this respect for quite some time, turning into a twitter evangelist, completely substituting blogging for it and attempting to convert everyone to join my ranks along the way. Though I did think of my blog, I only wanted to use it as a service that binds together together and periodically posts them in a blog every now and then, essentially trying to reverse the way horizontal all-encompassing services are created. Blogging services unfortunately weren't created with that in mind, nor should they be.

What I'll try to do from now on, however, is use both of them, each for their own purpose and undoubtedly far beyond that - after all, the services are there for us to test their limits.