David R. MacIver's Blog

Twitter as the death of blogging

(Warning: Navel gazing post about my blogging habits) I tweeted yesterday:

So I’ve got 181k words of published content on my blog and ~230k words of tweets. About 4 novels worth of me on the public internet. Yikes.

— David R. MacIver (@DRMacIver) December 12, 2012

(The blog word count is from the database for this blog. The twitter account is just a guesstimate based on the number of tweets I have). Alex Cruise replied:

@drmaciver as smartphones are the end of boredom, so Twitter is the end of long-form writing. Sadly boredom is often precursor to creativity

— Alex Cruise (@alexcruise) December 12, 2012

I thought this idea was particularly funny given that my blog productivity has been really high recently, but I wondered if there was any truth to it over all. It’s certainly an idea I’ve heard from a number of people over the years. I decided to investigate. Here’s my blog output by year since I’ve started this blog:

Year

Post count

Word count

2005

17

10681

2006

28

20496

2007

71

21741

2008

62

30203

2009

69

25858

2010

29

14507

2011

40

23163

2012

51

34670

Spot the bit where I start using twitter and my blog volume goes way down? No, me neither. 2005 was particularly quiet because I only had the blog for the last 3 months of it. 2010 because I was under NDA about what I was doing and had recently quit Scala, so I’d lost two significant sources of blogging, but all told my blog output seems to have stayed at a pretty consistent 20-30k words per year for most of the time I’ve had it. I don’t think this surprising in retrospect. Most of the thoughts I put on twitter are stuff which is too short to be worth blogging about, and most of the thoughts I put on here are things that would be painful to condense into 140c. Are we worrying unnecessarily about “Twitter making us dumb”?