The Microblogger

Posts Tagged ‘microblog’

Microblogging is easier than posting or blogging, but is it better?

Microblogging concepts are harder to describe in single posts than in blogs.

Consider that you’re a blogger; you start off with an idea or a concept, and you want to put that idea into words. You have a blog, so you take the time to create the content, forming your sentences and paragraphs in the same manner you would for every article or post that you publish.

You might include images or graphics, you might throw in a link or two, and you’ll likely proofread your writing to ensure that you don’t come across sounding like an idiot, or leaving yourself open to criticism from the Internet’s vast enforcement group of grammar police.

Blogging takes time and thought. It requires a certain amount of skill in writing (but not that much), and it requires that you put those thoughts to paper (or screen) in a clear, concise format, applying the proper formatting, and making the whole post or article read logically and rationally.

Microblogging is completely different than that, isn’t it?

Microblogging takes moments to project a thought or idea through the mainstream Internet. You take a handful of seconds to compose your tweet or your status update, and click <send> before it becomes part of the digital ether.

Microblogging almost absolves you of any responsibility for your posted comment, because it’s always under 140 characters (unless you have some URL shortening add-on that lets you attach longer character posts), it’s spur-of-the-moment, meaning that you just blurt it out and send it off, and you’re not expected to concern yourself with grammar, spelling, diction, syntax, or any of those other grammatical rules, because, hey, it’s basically the same as a text message, and you have to squeeze as much as you can into that tiny little post.

So, are microbloggers exempted from all of the established protocols for writing? Probably, because everyone else who reads Twitter posts or Tumblr tumbles, or Facebook updates, or any other method of micrblogging, writes and composes in the same manner, and does not expect perfect composition for every little post.

Some might say that microblogging is destroying our culture, as it encourages poor written skills. But is it? Perhaps it’s creating a hybrid form of language, wherein all of the microbloggers are actually thinking more creatively than traditionally writers, because they must put their thoughts and ideas into tiny little boxes, whereas the (regular) blogger like myself, might be filling up my blog posts with fluff and other filler, just to substantiate an invisible expectation of word length.

Microbloggers might actually be the pioneers, because they’re adapting to the restrictions imposed by the character limits of each post. They might have to make fundamental changes to how they write because they can’t into a picture to complement their post, giving the readers visual conceptualization of their writing (like cheating). Microbloggers can only add an outside link and hope that you’ve stirred the interest from your minimal verbage.

I think that microblogging serves a greater purpose, and one that allows microbloggers to co-exist with regular bloggers (if the two are not one-in-thesame). Microblogging this post might allow other microbloggers to discover blogging, or give them a portal to greater understanding of the Internet or humanity as a whole.

Now if I were to try and philosophize my idea into a single microblog post, I think I might have had some difficulty defining my concept–and I probably would have already moved on to another thought or idea, having given this one the 140 characters or less that it probably deserved!

read Graywolf’s SEO blog every single time he publishes a new article (I’m subscribed to his RSS feed), so when he wrote a response to Jason Calacanis’ comment about how SEO’s sucked, I had to read it. The article itself is a gem as Graywolf breaks down and critiques Mahalo, a project of Jason’s and bills itself as a community driven search engine. The point of my article though is that linkbait, a tactic to generate inbound links, comes in many forms and insulting someone is one powerful way.

It helps if you’re already relatively well known and people are listening, otherwise you’re insulting someone or something in an empty vacuum. But ultimately what you want to do is elicit an emotional response that compels someone to take action, in this case it is to respond to your post or comment and link to you.

The downside to this is that you may hurt your credibility in the process. Tons of people think Jason is a prick, I have no idea as I’ve never met the guy, so you have to be prepared to irk some people. But irk them enough to post and link.

When you’re a new blogger trying to make a name for yourself and increase your exposure, the best thing you can do is write compelling content that people will be interested in reading. The second best thing is to start linking to other sites in your niche. Compelling content will keep someone who finds your site, on your site. Linking to other sites will get other bloggers’ attention because everyone looks to see who sends traffic to them and who is linking to them.

I recommend linking to other similarly sized blogs. Linking to the largest and most popular blog in your niche is going to less effective because their traffic will make it difficult to see your referrals. If you send one or two people to their site and they get a thousand hits an hour, your referrals will be lost. If you send one or two people to a site that gets ten or even a hundred visits an hour, you stand a better chance of getting noticed.

Don’t send emails at first. Don’t send emails “asking permission” to link to someone, you know that an email isn’t necessary and they know an email isn’t necessary; don’t use your links as an excuse to email someone. There are plenty of reasons to contact someone, don’t use such a transparent reason. If you link a few times and start seeing traffic back from their admin panel or something similar, you know they’ve started noticing. Then you can email them and perhaps ask for a guest post or vice versa.

Linking out to sites also has a side benefit, you start associating yourself with a particular neighborhood and that never hurts.