"Welcome to the new, Twitterized kausfiles.com. Tweets and blog items in the same stream."

"Why do this? 1) I spend a lot of time and energy on Twitter. 2) Twitter was and is killing blogging. What used to be the fun short blog items are now tweets, leaving only the duller, long items for blogs — a drift toward dreariness accelerated by the need to attract links by writing Important Posts, and by Google’s apparent decision to favor longer posts in its search results (on the highly questionable theory that short posts are inherently less informative). I always thought readers preferred shorter items. The hell with Google. This new format should, in theory, put the fun items back on the blog...."

I'm glad to see that Mickey Kaus is thinking about format, after his rift with The Daily Caller, which has just about the ugliest format of any website that I visit (or used to visit, when Mickey was there).

I'm sorry I read about Google favoring longer posts. I put effort into making posts short and tend to write posts that are around 300 words or less, and Mickey links to a place that says you get better Google ranking if you go over 500 words and that 1500 words is ideal. In other words, blog posts should look like newspaper op-eds. It's easy to pad things out like that. But machines must be programmed to find what machines can find, and then writers program themselves to do what the machines will value. How dismal!

I think real readers can see how dismal these on-line columns are. Do they click to the page, glance at a few lines, and then go away? That's good enough to register as a "page view" and support advertising, but it doesn't mean the writer has any real readers. I believe in the kind of blogging that brings in readers who care about the writing and make a practice of coming back every day. The blog is a place and you want to go there to be with a writer.

Twitter doesn't work like that. You don't go to Twitter to see anybody in particular. It's more like taking a little walk on a busy street. You get the sense of being in the flow of things. If you put up a post, then you're one of the people who's seen flowing by in the crowd. You're not alone, but you also don't matter much. Why bother? Isn't it because you're trying to promote something else, even as you donate your work to Twitter, Inc.? But the people who look at Twitter don't click through to that other thing you're promoting. That's my experience. Writers are blowing our time away on Twitter, and yet Twitter is killing blogging.

In case you are wondering, this post is 475 words long. Still 25 words short of the minimum needed to get respect from Google. Even with that last sentence bemoaning the lack of respect. Ah, now I'm good.