Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: micro blogging

Blogging Gone Wild

TechSurfBlog-post1 People who've been reading this blog for a while may know I started it in 2005. That's a long time in blog years, and it's resulted in a monstrous archive of what people now call "long-form blogging" — at least it is for me, as one, lone writer.  My quick tally is about 400,000-500,000 words (several books' worth), and I can't even begin to guess the *time* I have into it. Let's just say it's been countless thousands of hours that I've spent filling this space — planning, thinking, writing, editing, covering events, managing comments, and, not the least, all the time spent in the behind-the-scenes (pain in the ass) administration of the site. That last part is especially a challenge with Typepad, the platform I chose way back when. Unfortunately, it hasn't kept up with bloggers' needs, especially from a UI/ease-of-use standpoint. (But the time to convert my blog to WordPress, as I might like, has just been way too much of a time hurdle to consider if I want to keep paying the bills with the income I have to generate in the non-blogging part of my business life.)

The whole notion of "micro" blogging wasn't even in our minds back in 2005. But, of course, those of you who follow me regularly know I've been posting the majority of my online content for the past few years on a certain site that starts with a "T"Twitter-logo With 11,000+ tweets there, at 140 characters each, that works out to some 200,000 words. And to say that's cut into my long-form blogging frequency here on this blog would be a gross understatement. Twitter, as it turned out, opened the floodgates on short-form, real-time blogging. But "blogging" almost seems like the wrong word these days, doesn't it?  Seems like it's really just about "content sharing" anymore, in the age we're in of never-ending "status updates." Speaking of which, yes, I'm of course on Facebook, too — here and here. Friend me at the first (my personal page) and fan me at the second (my company page). Or is it all about "Likes"? Whatever! Just click something there, will ya, and I'll be happy… :-)  [Note you can also now hit the little "Like" icon at the bottom of each of my blog posts here, as well as "Like" my blog overall in the sidebar to the right. We all *so* need to be liked these days…]

Where does it all end? Well, it doesn't. Which is the reason for this post. It's not to bore you with stats about my huge trove of blog content (which, along with $3.00, will get me a nice cup of coffee anywhere), but to tell you about other places where I'm now doing even more of that shorter-form blogging thing, in case you haven't run into me there yet. Flickr-GraemeAt least I'm having fun (I think). Just gotta keep sharing! These other domains of mine are more for my personal, random thoughts — and for sharing photos when I have some text to go along with them. Sure, I can share photos on Twitter (and I do, often, from my iPhone, with various Twitter apps) — but there are times when 140 characters just won't do. And then I have my Flickr account, which I think I've had about as long as this blog, where I can share anything I shoot — and I've done that with some 4500+ images, all neatly organized into sets.

Medium-Form Blogging?

But I like to say these other blogging places I'm about to tell you about are "somewhere in the vast expanse between my long-form and short-form blogging."  Here's one of them: my Posterous blog, which I've actually had for several months now. PosterousBlog-GraemeOn a site like this, I put up all kinds of stuff — I don't think much about it (unlike this site, which is really all about my serious, professional life). I can even email something to Posterous that instantly becomes a post. So, you'll see a whole array of…stuff. And maybe you've heard of PicPlz? It has an iPhone app I've started to use to share photos. Well, I've set those pix to also show up on my Posterous blog as individual posts.

TumblrBlog-Graeme As opposed to Instagram, another iPhone photo-sharing app (which I like even more). I have the pix I shoot with that app set to show up on my Tumblr blog, where I also post…other stuff. Just kinda started that one. Actually, there's no telling what posts will show up where, really. They just kinda happen, I guess, which I 'spose is the whole idea of real-time content sharing, right? I even did a kind of long post there recently (at least for Tumblr), a rarety — most people on it are just blogging a single photo, or maybe a video. But what is blogging, I say, without a little text, huh?  Words, baby! They make the world go round, don't they? (But, hey, that's a blogger talking.)

Like I say, blogging — it's gone wild.

Defrag08: The Definitive Twitter Firehose

Well, it's over. Another great Defrag conference — the second annual, to be exact.  And what a great event it was, in downtown Denver on Monday and Tuesday of this week. Defrag08-sign
Aha moments running rampant… Here's my entire Twitter coverage, in convenient "last first" arrangement for your reading pleasure… :-)  That is, if you start by scrolling back to my last Defrag08 tweet on Tuesday 11/4 about 4:30 pm, when I left for the airport.  My coverage totaled some 200 tweets, but I lost count.

Another way to see the ENTIRE FREAKING FIREHOSE is to simply type "Defrag08" in the search box at search.twitter.com.  That will show everyone's tweets that had the hashtag "#defrag08" contained within the already-oh-so-short 140 character tweet length.

And a ton of tweets it was! One speaker did an informal survey of the approximately 300 in attendance, and found upwards of 60% were Twittering the event! That has to be a high point for the larger tech gatherings like this that I regularly attend. (I wonder how many were live-blogging it?  I didn't hear of a single person! Surely a few were. But then blogging is so 2004.)

Yet another feed was one set up by EventVue especially for Defrag. This is a community site that has conference producers sign up with them, allowing their attendees to each create a profile, then interact with other attendees — even in the days before the event begins, as well as during and after. A few months ago, they added a Twitter feature. The nice thing about EventVue's aggregated Defrag feed — which captured the tweets of everyone at the event who was Twittering (as long as they had set up a profile on EventVue) — is that each Twitterer's profile photo showed up next to their tweets, so you could really associate the name to the face. (Note one thing on both of these feeds: post-Defrag tweets started showing up today. Also, I see that EventVue, via the feed link above, isn't allowing me to scroll back very far, to all the tweets during the actual event, Monday and Tuesday. I suspect they may also shut off new entries to this feed soon, or take it down altogether.  However, they previously also created the "@Defrag08" account at Twitter, where you can see all the event's tweets, going all the way back.)

It was amazing the worldwide conversation that all of us Defrag tweeps managed to get going during this very jam-packed event! Here are a couple of screen shots of replies I was getting to my Twitter account.  My favorite?  The one from "johnsonLAB" in Berlin at 1:00 am…  🙂

TweetReplies-toGT-1 















TweetReplies-toGT-2


















UPDATE:  Oh, I almost forgot — photos!  Here's my Flickr set (tagged "Defrag08"), which includes many of the slides I found interesting.

Why I Haven’t Been Blogging Much Lately: Micro-Blogging!

So, here’s a chart that shows what I’ve been doing lately instead of blogging here.  Yep, micro-blogging on Twitter. There’s a free service for us twitterers (or, as some call us, "tweeple") — it’s called TweetRush, and it lets us graph our recent Twitter activity. Pretty cool. Graemetwitterusage_2

So, for you blog readers out there that may have been wondering why I’m so quiet, I’m really not!  🙂  Heck, 232 tweets since July 19th is pretty darn active, wouldn’t you say?  And virtually none of these tweets is about what I’m eating for breakfast, or some lame thing like that, which is what a lot of Twitter detractors think people do there. Darn near all my tweets or "micro-posts" are news items or insights that I think my "followers" — approaching 400 now — would be interested in. Occasionally, some are replies to certain followers, too — though I prefer to do a lot of that privately via what Twitter calls "Direct Message" or DM.  Some people go nuts with Twitter replies, though — almost using it like group email or IM. Letting everyone sort of be voyeurs into their personal, one-on-one conversations. But I find that quite silly, actually, for the most part. I much prefer to use Twitter to publish useful tidbits and, especially, links that open people up to even more connected knowledge out there — and create conversations on the back channel, whether via DM or email. Twitter is having huge implications in marketing and PR. Game changing, as a matter of fact. I even have a friend — a reporter — who’s about to publish a book called "Twitter Means Business," which gets into a lot of that. (He interviewed me and people from about three dozen other companies.)

Do you use Twitter?  Are you following me there?  If not, please set up your own free account, and then click "follow" here: www.twitter.com/graemethickins. If you’ve already been using it, what do you think of it?  Is it changing your online life, as it is mine?

Is Twitter Affecting Blog Frequency? An Excellent Discussion…

A question keeps popping up for me: is "micro" blogging (as in Twittering) affecting "macro" blogging (as in what you’re looking at here)? I say it definitely is slowing down the frequency of regular blogging, because people are just spending so much time on Twitter — well, the rabid early adopters, anyway. But many of these happen to be long-time bloggers, too. So, Twitter’s bound to have an effect on how often they blog.  I also touched on this in a post a few weeks ago: Blogging Less, Twittering More.
But then I saw a discussion on FriendFeed a few days ago, which you see here in the graphic. [Okay, it took me a few days to post it because I was Twittering….and FriendFeeding.]  Twitteringcutsblogging_2

The comments to this post certainly tell the tale, confirming my own suspicions. By the way, I don’t know any of these people, including the poster, Veronica — but, yes, through the magic of Web 2.0, they’re all my "friends" now… 🙂

The original blog post that Veronica dugg on Digg was this one from Ryan Block, the editor-in-chief of Engadget: Does Twittering Mean You Blog Less?

By the way, if you want to keep up with me on Twitter, just go here and follow me: www.twitter.com/graemethickins.  And to subscribe to my FriendFeed, go here: http://friendfeed.com/graemethickins. There quite a discussion now going on amongst the digerati as to whether FriendFeed will overtake Twitter, with all the downtime and scaling problems the latter is having.  I even questioned in a recent tweet whether FriendFeed might be bought by Google (which would be interesting, since it was founded by ex-Googlers).

What do you think? Do you like one over the other? Have you even tried either one? Does any of this matter, or it is all just about the kool kids trying to find the next fad?