It’s all Twitter’s fault
Yes, I do remember I have a blog, and no I don’t have a good excuse for not updating it … but that’s not going to stop me having a damn good go at convincing you otherwise.
Personally I blame Twitter! Admittedly that’s not a particularly good or original excuse, as the many google hits will prove, but I’m going to hold on to that as the main excuse for why I’ve stopped blogging until you pry it from my cold dead hands. Admittedly my blogging has not been remotely frequent, and the advent of Twitter does not appear to co-incide with any particular change to my pattern of posting. However, I will say that I’ve tweeted (as much as I hate that term) significantly more that I have blogged, and here’s 2 reasons why.
1. Having a maximum post size of 160 characters makes it less effort to do. And as you’ll no doubt have realised, I’m all about being lazy. I know I could do neither, but then I just hassle from soooo many people (I’ll not name names right now) about not having blogged. At least I can point at my Twitter account and say I am (semi) regularly posting on that. Makes me feel marginally less guilty. But just knocking out a Twitter message can be done in a few seconds … as long as it (literally) takes to type a SMS message, whereas a blog post (at least in my mind) requires significantly more thought.
2. The second reason is that I don’t really feel I have much interesting to say. I’ve tried to keep the (few) posts on here less about the mundane day to day (or year to year) of my life and have tried to inject a bit if humour into them, but that takes a lot of effort (see point 1). I feel anything interesting I do have to say can be said in under 160 characters.
However, sometimes it is nice to go back and re-read old blog posts (my own and other peoples) and get a sense of what was actually going through my mind at that point in time. Even if the entries seem a bit banal I can generally remember, or deduce, what state of mind I was in when I posted the entry. I find I can’t really do the same with Twitter.
So, while it would be foolish and somewhat foolhardy of me to say this is me back to some form regular blogging, I think I may be able to put in the effort to string a pile of 160 character thoughts together and produce some form or semi-wordy blog post slightly more frequently than I have of late. I know that will probably have you all signing up to the RSS feed, and clearing a space in your weekly schedule to read the new posts, but I wouldn’t set your expectations too high quite yet….