Sunday 29 August 2010

Blog v Twitter

A few days ago a good friend Paul Pedrazzi tweeted this:


A million blogs withered and died as their authors stopped taking the time to process their thoughts... and switched instead to simply copying and pasting them into the world, 140 meaningless characters at a time.
– Thnks Fr Th Mmrs: The Rise Of Microblogging, The Death Of Posterity

The idea as I see it is that as we throw out our thoughts on twitter we no longer have the discipline to write a more researched article in a blog.

I understand the point but am not sure I agree. In my world, that of Oracle, there are some phenomenal bloggers who write both entertaining and educational blogs. I have to say most of them are technically based, and it may be easier to write about something 'tangible' rather than thoughts; but many of them do also 'comment'. My favourite bloggers are Cary Millsap, Steven Chan, Ray Wang, Floyd Teter and Mogens Nørgaard would make the list if he blogged a little more. I subscribe to the OakTable blog RSS and OracleApps and read most of them. I have to admit if they are too technical I switch off but it is amazing how much you can learn.It is true that the people listed are my friends but wouldn't it be rude not to be interested in what they write?

Kyle Hailey blogged recently to share the of PHD school in pictures well I never even went to university but I think I can use the analogy to show what ready blogs has done for me (you may need to read the original very short blog if you are not familiar).

So to me:












Sometimes you are introduced to new blogs and start to follow them. One I love and can't recommend highly enough is Big Daddy Paul. The connection with Oracle is that the subject of the blog is a young boy whose Mother works for Oracle. His father who had his own successful career decided to give it up to be the primary carer, and my he is funny. I will be first in the queue to buy the promised book. Not only is it funny but it so resonates with my feeble attempts at child rearing, (but everything turned out OK my daughter is wonderful). But I digress.....

Do I therefore think Twitter is bad? No, twitter gives you an instant release and quite often an instant reply. It is often used to point to blog postings or articles that otherwise I might not have seen. I LOVE twitter at an event, a conference, it adds so much 'buzz' to the event and if you can't be there you can feel a small part of it.

Can I blame Twitter for slowing down my blog posts? Not really, I am a procrastinator and although reading twitter and facebook might take up time, if it wasn't that it might be something else. However today I am making a big effort to catch up, and I will try and be more disciplined.

No comments: