The Desert of My Dreams

During the past few months, I’ve been observing some changes in the blogging behaviors of many of my friends. I’ve been referring to their behavior as microblogging. I thought I was onto something new but a quick Live search reveals that the term has been floating around for awhile (just when I thought I had invented a new term!). I couldn’t find anything that actually defined it, though, so I figured I’d give my notion of what it means, what I’ve been observing, and why it’s important.

What is it?

Microblogging is just what it sounds – it’s regularly publishing small pieces of content on the web. The best example of microblogging is Twitter (from the same guys that brought you old school pre-Google-acquisition Blogger and Odeo). Twitter is a nifty new service that allows you to create a microblog of small pieces of text that you can update from your mobile, IM, or via the Twitter site (for an example, here’s my Twitter).

However, I don’t believe that Twitter is the first (or only) form of microblogging. I’ve been observing this trend of micro-microcontent (many people think regular blogging is microcontent) in various forms – del.icio.us (when posting a small note along with a bookmark), flickr (when posting a bit of text along with a photo), Facebook status, and even adding a review on Yelp could be considered microblogging.

So the common denominator between these examples is short content and minimal commitment.

My observations

Recently, I’ve observed that many of my friends have shifted their posting from their regular blogs to these various forms of microblogs. For instance, some of my friends haven’t updated their blogs in weeks (and some haven’t even updated them in months) but these same friends regularly post to their del.icio.us and flickr accounts. What I find even more interesting are my friends who would never think of starting a blog but have now become regular contributors to their del.icio.us and/or flickr accounts.

Microblogs are more appealing for a number of reasons. First, they offer a low level of commitment from both the blogger and reader. The blogger posts much shorter content, which is easier to update. The reader doesn’t have to commit to reading a lengthy post that they may or may not like. Moreover, because the posts are so short, the reader is more likely to read them and possibly leave a comment in return. The comments fuel the microblogging fire. A comment reinforces the blogger, illustrating that not only is the blogger’s content being read, it is of enough interest to generate new micro-microcontent.

In addition, I don’t think microblogs carry the same pressure to regularly update content that we usually associate with regular blogging. Merely by their design and format, traditional blogs tend to emphasize the dates/times of updates and the frequency of posts. One of the first things that you tend to notice on a blog is when it was lasted updated. Some blogs even roll the content on the home page, so if a blogger hasn’t updated her blog she ends up with an embarrassingly empty home page. The same isn’t true for a flickr, del.icio.us, or Yelp account. You immediately see the last updated entries, whether they occurred today, last week, or three months ago. Moreover, the date of these entries isn’t as prominent in the design.

So what?

In a world where the term blog is overused and over-hyped and blogs are misused, it’s interesting and refreshing to observe these changes in the blog format. You certainly can’t create a community around your cause/product/grad program with an ill-conceived blog, and you’re certainly not going to do it if the format changes. I also feel that this deviation in blogging validates blogging and signals its maturity as a format.

Now what?

All of these observations are anecdotal in nature and merely based on the behavior of a very small and non-diverse sample. The real questions at this point are whether any of these thoughts are true when examined with a larger and more representative sample. Is this really a phenomenon? And what sort of people are doing this? Are those new to social software jumping in to microblogging and skipping past traditional blogging or is microblogging a path along the blogging continuum (read other blogs > start your own blog > start microblogging)?