Chris Lott

Twitter is having problems again and I have to admit that it’s even trying even my boundless patience. The closer you get to real-time services the more impatient people will be. I get it. The comparable instability of Flickr and del.icio.us back in the day felt less intense.

But I have to laugh at the Net Pundits giving Twitter a few weeks to live before it dies because "the luminaries" such Scoble, Winer, Arrington, etc. will leave. Do people really care if these one-way broadcasters who aren’t following them, aren’t listening to them, and who care as much or more about their statistics than anything either themselves or their followers might talk about, migrate elsewhere?

I have a theory that the pundit migration would actually be a great boon to Twitter. I won’t miss anything actually important that the luminaries say– when they do it gets endlessly amplified in the tech guru echo chamber and I’m bound to hear the echo– and perhaps removing the load on the servers represented by stats-sluts and their ego-searching, Twitter Karma sifting, constantly shouting Tweet personae would improve system stability for the rest of us.

As for me, it’s a stand-off. I won’t move until a significant part of the group I follow moves. The platform pales in comparison to the people… I’d rather get the good stuff with the occasional speed-reducing hiccup than wander a desert landscape inhabited mostly by the bloated carcasses of the punditocracy erecting elaborate, Ozymandian structures to honor themselves.

I’ve been singing the same tune as Hugh MacLeod in classes and at conferences for a while. If people are blogging less now it is only because so many other ways of being present and participating are available, each of them particularly suited for a particular kind (or granularity) of expression.

Twittering and Tumbling and Facebooking aren’t preventing people from blogging… they are creating new ways for people to express themselves in ways that blog engines– in all their variety– fit only approximately at best. Something that fits well as a Twit is going to be at best wedged into the stream of blog entries. If one can share something through a Facebook widget satisfactorily, then the impulse probably didn’t need to find its way (at that point) to a blog entry or wiki page.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that people have mistaken a single kind of tree for the forest. I’m guilty of hand-wringing about the death of publishing when publishing continues to see explosive growth when what I am really unhappy about is the lack of publication of the writers and kind of writing that I have grown to have a particular interest in. Let’s forget about the dying of the blog and start paying attention to the incredible wave of lightweight, frictionless, gatekeeper free participation mechanisms that are now at our command for utterances large and small.

Does the word “blog” really mean anything anymore? When a term encompasses sites from BoingBoing to Borderland, and MetaFilter to Quantum Gravity in the Lab, how is the term useful? Saying “I don’t like blogs” is really saying “I don’t like the net” or “I don’t like things being published.” I doubt most who use those words actually mean that.

Blogging was never the point– participation, presence and publishing were. There’s a reason so many of us were blogging before there were any blogs and now spend time trying to make others see the publishing revolution that is at-hand and of far greater impact than the word “blog” can hope to represent.