Does Twittering mean you blog less? The answer might surprise you.

The other Twitter-related post I’ve been wanting to write lately regards the correlation between the decline of “regular” blogging (which I’m now referring to as macroblogging), and microblogging (specifically, Twittering). Ask anyone with a blog that also spends time Twittering, and they’ll likely tell you that as their microblogging has gone up, their macroblogging has gone down. That’s definitely been my take — I’ve been Twittering a lot more in the last six months, and I feel like it’s has a substantial impact on the volume of posting on my personal site.

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. More…

The era of “all press is good press” is so very over

I’ve had innumerable conversations with friends and colleagues over the years who’ve somehow felt burned by name-your-publication; nowadays even non-celebrities can (and often do) live with a cloud over their head on the internet — and I think if there’s any one truism about the intersection of publicity and online media, it’s that the era of “all press is good press” is long gone. Maybe that’s a given, but here’s exactly why:

The theory used to be that because exposure came party to an ephemeral medium (print), one could usually find value in bad press for its ability to act as a mechanism of discovery and interest-upkeep. This value thought to be inherently greater than any lasting damage, especially when that medium — print — is such a finite commodity, and getting any press at all presented a major challenge. And hey, either way tomorrow morning it’s out of sight, out of mind.

The democratization of niche micro-publishing, though, completely killed the concept of good bad press. Whereas before your press had positive or negative value equatable only to the number of eyeballs who bought and scanned that piece of paper, now any and all exposure you receive is equally findable, be it on the New York Times or on Jim’s Yet-Another-Wordpress Blog. In fact, scratch that — usually the more negative or salacious the exposure, the greater the weight it seems to carry (and thus more probable it is to be highly ranked in search). See: Sarah Lacy.

And, of course, all the upsides to the good bad press seem obviated; the medium is no longer ephemeral, there’s no barrier to entry for publishing OR consuming, and there’s certainly no limit on how many bad things can be said about you (or your company, product, movie, etc.). Anyone can hide from tomorrow’s paper, but no one can hide from nigh-immortal data that’s indexed, cached, and forever more findable.

What’s it mean? Well, maybe that’s not for me to say. But I certainly hope we, as a society that now both consumes and contributes to media at large, can think a little harder about things before hitting the all-powerful publish button.
Photo via Worth1000

Doogie Howser: kid, doctor, original blogger

We were at the “Bloggers who made it” panel at SXSW today, when a revelatory moment came up during Q&A. We all knew Doogie was a forerunner in the burgeoning field of children-doctors, but few remember that he was actually the first blogger way back in ‘89. Seriously, way ahead of his time.