What’s remarkable about [David Frum, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, and Paul Krugman], what gives me hope that there may be a way out of the bigger mess, of which this month’s meltdown is just a sympton, is that finally blogging is effectively routing around MSM. If you want to hear from smart people who know what they’re talking about, and who aren’t spinning, you can.
This is why blogging is important.
Dave Winer – A little truth leaks out.
And a week or so later, when you try to remember what you said at this party, that really terrific thing, you rack your brain, but can’t quite come up with it. That’s Twitter.
The blog, on the other hand, is slow, reliably reference-able, and findable. It’s like a speech, prepared in advance, with the text distributed. Some will hear the speech on the day it’s delivered, but others will be able to reference its text across the years.
Randy Murray – Business Blogging: Tweet For The Moment, Blog For The Ages.
I drove down to Eugene today to chat with Suzi Steffen’s J508 – Reporting and Information Strategies class. It’s always a lot of fun talking with Suzi’s classes and I think it’s awesome that she brings in people to talk with her students. Something I wish had happened more often in my college education.
I promised the class notes from what I talked about so here goes.
One of the things I spent a while talking about was the idea that you can take all the byproducts from working on a story and turn them into something valuable. This not only provides an outlet for interesting information that doesn’t fit in your main day-to-day production, but also lets others learn from what you’ve already come across.
A tremendous recent example is the way Will Davis has chronicled the Bangor Daily News’ move to having an entirely WordPress-powered site. He’s created a development blog where’s he’s posting tons of helpful back story about the switch. Not only is a cool way of publishing all that extra knowledge but it also got Will, and the BDN some great press.
37signals also does a terrific job of this with their Signal vs. Noise blog. It’s full of great things they’ve run across and lessons they’ve learned while building great products.
Something else I touched on was making use of many different formats to tell your stories. Sometimes a story is just an image, other times a 3,000 written piece fits better. The great thing about the web is that your story can take whatever form is most appropriate.
Jeff Jarvis defines this when he writes about what it means to be a digital first news organization. He writes:
Digital first, aggressively implemented, means that digital drives all decisions: how news is covered, in what form, by whom, and when. It dictates that as soon as a journalist knows something, she is prepared to share it with her public. It means that she may share what she knows before she knows everything.
Handily there are tons of ways you can do this with very little cost. WordPress.com has many themes that support various post formats. Tumblr is another option. Twitter, in a way, is even another format you can use to tell stories.
Something I forgot to mention when talking about Twitter is an insightful example that Marshall Kirkpatrick gives about how he tracks the future of the music industry on Twitter. If you’re stuck on figuring out how Twitter can help you as a journalist go read that post.
Marshall’s also talked about other ways he finds information at a couple of conferences at the U of O. Daniel Bachhuber posted some notes from one back in 2009. If you ever get the chance to hear Marshall speak about this stuff take it. I guarantee you’ll learn a ton.
Something I totally neglected to cover was that for all your WordPress.com questions we have a really solid support site. If you’re stuck on how to do something or just want to see how you can make better use of the platform you’ll likely find the answer in there. If you don’t feel free to get in touch.
Instapaper was the first tool I mentioned. Like I said, it’s fundamentally changed my life and how I consume information. I really can’t recommend it enough. Use it.
Evernote and Simplenote were the next two I mentioned. These are like digital reporter’s notebooks and are really great buckets for putting information in to. I use Simplenote, which also syncs seamlessly with Notational Velocity on my Mac. While it’s limited to text the advantage is that all the files are stored as plain text files and can be accessed with any text editor. For future proofing your data there’s not a whole lot better than plain text.
I also recommend taking the 10 minutes necessary to get Google Reader up and running with subscriptions to your favorite sites. They even have a handy video that explains everything. Having automated content subscriptions that you check regularly can really help you stay on top of things.
Anyway, that’s it. I’ve likely left things out so feel free to ask me about them.
But try to imagine replacing Daring Fireball, Scripting News, Apple Outsider, Shawn Blanc, or any of a number of great blogs with something like Twitter. You can’t. You’d have to invent blogs so that these writers have somewhere to write.
If blogs are dead, what are we reading in Instapaper?
If blogs are turning into places for more thoughtful writing, rather than as the only place to share stuff, I think that’s awesome. We have a more diverse, interesting, textured set of web-tools than we used to. That’s good.
Brent Simmons – Gopher dead, blogging lives.
But that made sense to me because it was not that the technology was new, it was that we had figured out this medium, at least one of the native forms of what the Web was good for. It was about freshness and about frequency, and it was about the democratization of media and giving power to everybody and the universal desire for personal expression and the attraction to a real, compelling personal voice.
Evan Williams – Founders at Work
Text to WordPress In One Easy Step. Cool tutorial for setting up a one step publishing workflow from iA’s Writer to WordPress. Bonus points for working with WordPress.com and self-hosted installations.
Put another way, writing a weblog full time is not unlike farming. Lots of chores and lots of busy work that take up time every single day, but the fruit of that labor is seasonal.
Shawn Blanc – An Ode to Software.
For people in the press, bloggers vs. journalists is an elaborate way of staying the same, of refusing to change, while permitting into the picture some of the stressful changes I have mentioned. A shorter way to say this is: it’s fucking neurotic.
Jay Rosen in The Twisted Psychology of Bloggers vs. Journalists.
Really writing forces us to lock the words into whatever contraption is being used to write. I like typewriters because it’s hard to take out the paper and crumple it up while writing. The easiest movement is FORWARD. Typewriters are momentum machines. Real writing pushes forward. Tweets push in every direction at once. These are not value judgements, these are just some observations.
Frank Chimero – Tweeting and Writing and Deflating Like a Balloon.
November 1st was the last time I posted anything on Twitter. Since then this blog has been my home online.
A couple of days ago Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote a thank you letter to Evan Williams. It was a powerful piece and got me thinking. While Twitter still frustrates me in many ways it nonetheless remains an incredible community and a remarkable publishing tool. 1 It’s simple, fast, and available everywhere.
Recently I kept a Twitter folder in my RSS reader of a group of people who I wanted to follow. This felt like a total hack. Similarly, while some people have taken to blogging more, the reality is that a ton (the majority?) of conversation still happens on Twitter. I want to be a part of that again. Conversation is integral to keeping the mind fresh and churning.
I’m setting some ground rules to keep things sane. I plan to follow fewer people. Nothing against the 100 or so people I unfollowed last night. It’s just that I only have so many brain cycles in a day. I’m currently at about 150. That feels like a good number to me for now. Maybe it’ll go up a bit but probably not too much.
Most importantly, anything I post on Twitter will be published here. My blog is my home online. When I publish content I want to bring it into that home, not relegate it to a rented storage locker out back.
I’ll also get my tweet archive back up and running. Even with Twitter, though, if it’s important enough to post then I should be blogging about it. As Anil Dash said, if you didn’t blog it, it didn’t happen.
Notes: