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.

Although blogging can trace its roots to zine / underground publishing culture, it wasn’t until the first blog CMSs landed in 1999 and 2000 (like Blogger and Movable Type) that mainstream audiences experimented with self-publishing. Those blogging at the time might remember what a highly platform-based experience it was. RSS and other forms of one:any (not just one:many) aggregation hadn’t yet come into widespread use, meaning some of those early platforms fed right back into their own siloed communities. This was especially apparent in the case of LiveJournal, which was really popular back then. Way late to RSS, LiveJournal instead relied on a light social networking system that aggregated posts to groups of friends using the service. Sounds familiar. Of course, blogging eventually grew up and out of its early stages into something far more horizontal and platform independent, ensuring the activity of blogging didn’t tie users to just one system and set of relationships.

Although Twitter should be clearly wary of users eventually fleeing for a distributed, decentralized, relationship-based cloud of microblogging, I think most in the know would agree that ultimately it’s what the medium needs to make the next step. Because of Twitter’s dependence on relationships, though, that transition probably won’t come easily; perhaps that’s where services like FriendFeed and other meta-aggregators step in as the glue for disparate, distributed life-content apps. Or perhaps that’s the tack Twitter needs to build into its own business, ensuring it makes the transition from early platform to future technology leader.