Marshall Kirkpatrick, while attending this weekend’s WordCamp:
Blogging is beautiful, it elevates the human spirit and enriches public life…I remember discovering how easy it was to blog, not so many years ago, and I really hope that lots of people are still discovering how easy and how rewarding it is every day today.
Next Step. Marshall Kirkpatrick is leaving his daily role at ReadWriteWeb to build a product and a company. It’s called Plexus Engine and sounds pretty cool. The post is also on his personal blog but that seems down now.
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:
How to Track the Future of the Music Industry. Marshall Kirkpatrick gives a bit of insight into how he’s tracking the future of the music industry via Twitter. This type of journalism-hacking is brilliant.