I’ve noticed something over the past few months that I keep meaning to blog about, but just never seem to find the time to sit down and get into these days. If only I could phrase my thoughts on this topic into 140-character bites, I’d be all set…
As you may have guessed, the main concern centers around Twitter, and the idea that I know many people have already suggested with regards to Twitter ruining their own blogs. And I know that it sounds a bit harsh, but I can’t help but notice the rapid decline in my own blog posts since I began using Twitter as well:
January 2009 – 7 blog posts
February 2009 – 11 blog posts, 1 Twitter post
March 2009 – 19 blog posts, 24 Twitter posts
April 2009 – 1 blog post, 22 Twitter posts
May 2009 – 6 blog posts, 30 Twitter posts
* Note: each Twitter post represents the daily summary of my Tweets, so each day may have had multiple Tweets – I’m just counting them once a day for comparison against my regular LiveJournal posts.
Now I suppose other influences need to be considered here as well – since January 1, I’ve been actively keeping up with my weekly humor column, and I’ve also been working on bringing some other various writing online as well. That, coupled with life just being extraordinarily busy lately could very well justify the lack of blog posts, and to that note maybe I should be happy that I’m using Twitter because otherwise I wouldn’t have hardly anything for some months at all!
But that said, the other glaring issue that I notice about using Twitter is that it’s not nearly as reminiscent-friendly as my regular blog posts are, meaning that while I can jump back several years into my archives and have some rather interesting reading about where I was in life at any given time, I find it hard to get that same level of experience from Twitter simply because the posts aren’t really archive-friendly, for lack of a better term. I mean, sure, I could search my old tweets via Twitter’s interface if I already know what I’m looking for, but frankly, a lot of the time I’m just randomly browsing due to boredom and I find myself just picking a month and year out of the blue to see what was going on at the time. With regular blog posts, each post subject makes it very easy to browse through those archives curiously, but with Twitter where every post says Daily Tweets from Twitter … not so much.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy using Twitter because a lot of my observations and rants out on the street, if you will, finally have a chance to get written down whereas prior to Twitter, chances are I’d forget them by the time I got home. So for mobile blogging in short bursts, Twitter is very cool, but ultimately I think in order for me to truly have a worthwhile journal here that I’ll want to return to 5 years down the road, I’ve got to make more of an effort for the regular blog posts again. Even just the once a weekend, big summary posts I think are fine – just anything with more than a sentence or two of content, really.
Now the other thing that I’ve been thinking about, and I actually started making updates this evening to help correct for it, is creating a second (better) means of searching through all of those archives by means of tagging. According to LiveJournal, I’ve got just shy of 1,200 entries here spanning more than six years, so it kind of goes without saying that browsing all of that month by month ain’t gonna cut it much longer. Fortunately LiveJournal already supports tagging, so it’s really just a matter of working my way back through the archives and adding those tags as I have time. I think I might also consider using the memories feature because I know there are at least a handful of posts in that time that are worth highlighting.
We’ll see! Overall, I’m trying to look at this in the long haul, so whatever I can do to make the whole thing more useful and interesting over time would be ideal. I guess ultimately I just think it’s cool to have a written record to be able to look back at times like when I first moved to Florida or when I proposed to Sara – I’m thinking if some of it makes for interesting reading now, it should be even cooler twenty or thirty years from now when we’ve bought a house and raised kids (that are hopefully not crazy) and all of that!
Oh good grief, I don’t want to think that far into the future, so let’s just leave it at this: need blog more for sake of personal history.