Tag: tweets

Caffeine + information overload = insomnia

Dave

I never have trouble sleeping. The last time I remember having any real trouble getting to sleep was seven or eight years ago the night my house was robbed. Oh, and ten years or so ago when I decided to start drinking coffee. After a few weeks I was having rapid heartbeat and withdrawal headaches and insomnia and realized I had gotten to my mid-30s without developing a caffeine addiction and that was no time to start. But today I had a big cup of regular coffee with an espresso shot and now, more than 12 hours later, I can’t sleep.

I’m getting a similar feeling from Twitter these days. I love the concept. I love the immediacy. I love being able to see what people are doing and reading and recommending in such a short format. As a writer I find it a fascinating exercise in brevity and craft. But come on, how do you keep up with it? I just added half a dozen people in the last couple of days, for a total of 60 people I’m following, and I already feel overwhelmed. Guy Kawasaki alone sent 54 tweets in the last 23 hours. With an inbox holding 2,000+ emails that need to be read, deleted or filed, I get enough of that feeling from my Web 1.0 channels.

I just downloaded TweetDeck in the vague hope it would provide some relief, but while a nice interface, it doesn’t really address the problem of having enough time to read it all. I’ve starred quite a few tweets that contain links to articles I want to read later, but now I have a backlog of tweets to follow up on. Did I mention I have 2,000 emails in my inbox? How about the number of unread items in my Google Reader? I don’t need another firehose.

Is Twitter really a positive development in communication? Or will we start seeing articles in the next couple of years by people describing how they’ve increased their productivity by, as impossible as it sounds, turning off Twitter. “At first it was hard, and my colleagues had difficulty adjusting, but now I realize I’m getting more done.”

Twitter a tool for terrorists?

Dave

A paper written by a US Army intelligence group examines the possible uses terrorists could have for mobile technologies, including Twitter. I read about in in Information Week. Of course, just about any technology can be put to nefarious use, but I suppose it’s a good thing that there are people in the military who are looking at this kind of thing.

Still, it all starts to sound a bit odd. For one thing, the paper was written by the 304 Military Intelligence Battalion Open Source Intelligence Team. That’s quite a name. Do you think they get special berets? What would their badge look like? An eagle with a keyboard in one talon and a mouse in the other?

Maybe soon we’ll be deploying social media denial teams into Iraq and Afghanistan.

Would you rather read this, or 37 tweets?

Dave

I started this blog in 2003. I was looking for work and it gave me a creative outlet – something to do other than check Monster every hour hoping that companies in the Raleigh-Durham area had suddenly started hiring marcomm managers again. Most – no, all – of the blogs I read at the time were personal journals: mainly of a small group of friends, but the circle eventually broadened, as it does, to include people who stumbled across one of us and started reading, commenting on and blogrolling all of us. Plooble’s apex came when Wendy McClure added me to her blogroll at Pound and my hit count went north of 1,500 per day.

Eventually, inevitably, I got a full-time job and no longer had the time to write carefully-crafted posts with a thesis and conclusion and a photo to go with it. The problem was I had set myself a standard for the blog and had a very difficult time making the shift to blogging sporadically and about whatever popped into my head. One by one, Plooble started dropping off those blogrolls, and understandably so. Who wants to direct someone to a blog with a year-old post at the top?

After a few years hiatus, I’ve revivified this blog, even if I’m not quite sure what to do with it. I’m struck by how much blogging has changed since 2003. For one thing, quite a few people who started blogging when I did kept it up, and as a result some of them are making a living at it. That never occurred to me. Or I should say that it did, but I had no concept of how that would actually happen. I remember a friend at the time saying, no doubt in an email or possibly an IM: “blog + PayPal = $.” I didn’t quite know what she meant by that.

The biggest change is that blogs have become a new form of journalism, whereas a scant five years ago they were, depending on your perspective, personal journals shared with friends or outlets for poorly-punctuated self-indulgent whining.

This change is so profound that Paul Boutin, writing in Wired, has declared blogs dead and advised all bloggers to pull the plug and move to Twitter. Obviously he’s not the first writer to try to attract attention by proclaiming the death of a popular trend. But in this case I think he’s completely wrong. It makes no more sense to say that blogs are dead than it does to say that television is dead. Yes, broadcast TV is going through tremendous changes and being challenged by YouTube and Hulu and Netflix and the thing that just got created while I was typing that list, but how many times in the last few weeks have you seen or heard someone talking about Tina Fey’s portrayals of Sarah Palin? What’s important is that NBC is creating content people want to see. The medium in which they want to see it is secondary.

In 2003, when you said you were a blogger, it had meaning. It said you were among a smallish group of people who had embraced a new technology and were using it to tell people something, probably something about yourself. Or maybe your cat. These days saying you’re a blogger doesn’t carry any more meaning than saying you’re an emailer.

But that doesn’t mean blogging is dead. It means that the tools, technology and techniques pioneered by a few have spread to many, who are using them to do any number of things that have little or no correlation other than the medium. Far from making blogging dead, it makes it more vital than ever, even as the concept of being a “blogger” comes to mean almost nothing at all.

I will happily admit that I now use Twitter and Facebook to communicate with friends in more or less the same way I used to use this blog. And I do it far more often because it takes so little time and I don’t feel pressured to create a magnum opus every time.

On the other hand, I would have had a hard time saying all of this in 140 characters.