So I decided to plot the numbers to prove the theory that Twittering was, in fact, causing my personal blogging to atrophy. I had a very clear image in my head of what the two lines would look like: the blog would be trending down ever so slowly, taking nosedives during busy months, while the Twitter line would be going up pretty fast. So you can imagine my utter surprise when I hit the render chart button and the following showed up.

Although it’s obvious that my microblogging activity has exploded over the past few months, I absolutely was not expecting to find that as each activity goes up or down, the other almost always moves with it in parallel. Clearly it’s not always directly proportional (as most dramatically evidenced in this March’s spike), but that’s easily attributed to the ease and speed of microblogging vs. writing a full blog post — which is probably what led to the assumption that one affected the other in the first place.

So totally counter to that intuition, it would seem that, at least in my case, microblogging and blogging are not at all in opposition. If anything, both are probably just tied to the total amount of free time I have at my disposal. Hopefully others will chart their respective micro/macroblogging output so we can see if this revised theory of blog-atrophy actually holds true.

P.S. -Big ups to Twitterholic for spying keeping track of everybody’s Twitter usage.

The theory used to be that because exposure came party to an ephemeral medium (print), one could usually find value in bad press for its ability to act as a mechanism of discovery and interest-upkeep. This value thought to be inherently greater than any lasting damage, especially when that medium — print — is such a finite commodity, and getting any press at all presented a major challenge. And hey, either way tomorrow morning it’s out of sight, out of mind.

The democratization of niche micro-publishing, though, completely killed the concept of good bad press. Whereas before your press had positive or negative value equatable only to the number of eyeballs who bought and scanned that piece of paper, now any and all exposure you receive is equally findable, be it on the New York Times or on Jim’s Yet-Another-Wordpress Blog. In fact, scratch that — usually the more negative or salacious the exposure, the greater the weight it seems to carry (and thus more probable it is to be highly ranked in search). See: Sarah Lacy.

And, of course, all the upsides to the good bad press seem obviated; the medium is no longer ephemeral, there’s no barrier to entry for publishing OR consuming, and there’s certainly no limit on how many bad things can be said about you (or your company, product, movie, etc.). Anyone can hide from tomorrow’s paper, but no one can hide from nigh-immortal data that’s indexed, cached, and forever more findable.

What’s it mean? Well, maybe that’s not for me to say. But I certainly hope we, as a society that now both consumes and contributes to media at large, can think a little harder about things before hitting the all-powerful publish button.
Photo via Worth1000