Monday, June 02, 2008

I blame twitter

I have been abysmal at blogging recently, and I blame twitter. Now that summer is here, I am going to try to be more active. Fred Stutzman has posted some thoughtful insights about twitter, and I'll echo some of his ideas here. I think the two reasons I have been twittering and not blogging boil down to:
1. Knowledge of who my audience is when I blog
2. Limited amount of text on twitter
Not having a sense of who is reading is disconcerting and makes me less likely to try to fit blogging into an already busy day. Which relates of course to point 2 - the time commitment needed to maintain a vibrant blog seems beyond my capacities at the moment. Especially when it would take time away from actually getting research published. 140 characters is just so addictive and so effortless. On the other hand, twitter posts are ephemeral in two ways - they disappear (for the most part) and don't seem to be indexed by google. Thus my decision to try to maintain both modes of broadcasting, plus the occasional facebook status update, and to focus on the blog as a way to update folks about my activities and engage in pre-scholarship that will lead to published, peer-reviewed research. Wish me luck!

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