"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.
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I understand why people like its pithyness, but I hate the look and formatting of twitter. The @ signs and the # signs and the repetition do not appeal to me.
Via its own app or web site, Twitter does have a horribleness to it. You have to use a good app, such as Tweetbot, to make it a pleasant experience.
Twitter is for people with ADD.
Twitter is 'pithy' in the same way that "Four legs good, two legs bad" is 'pithy'.
I read Kaus much less after his move to DC. He once said they only wanted pieces of a certain length, which he dutifully provided. Sometimes an item doesn't deserve more than a few words, but those types of items were either filtered out or stretched to the point of tedium.
Here's hoping this move brings back the old Kaus.
Twitter is a self-publicizing medium. That is why people misuse it: those who understand what it is use it carefully for what it is good for. Those who use it to get out long-form essays do not.
What was it Abraham Lincoln said? Something like "better to keep quiet and be thought a fool than to use 140 characters to remove all doubt."
I agree about the Daily Caller's format. Not only is the basic page style ugly as sin, but it's replete with intrusive ads. I try not to click on Instapundit's links when they lead there.
I generally only find Twitter useful to the extent that people share links to articles I wouldn't have otherwise seen -- though links accompanied by a single phrase ("wow - read this!") are pretty lousy. What's worse is the fact that twitter-conversations sometimes get "broken" and you can't see the original article, just the subsequent claims.
I go to twitter. It's just a blog page for the particular writer. Maybe it looks different if you're actually enrolled in twitter, I don't know.
Once a day they ask you to enroll and you X out or just reload the page.
What you want for daily returns is good commenters.
Ads, get ad-block.
# used to be the unix erase-character.
So you could fake stty failures like
Dear assho#####friend,
Twitter would be my medium because I have short thoughts.
I just don't have that many of them.
Some people are good at Twitter. It's like the old telegraph.
I agree with him about social media's effect on blogs. When I want to react and interact on realtime, I write on Facebook, sometimes on Twitter, and that's had a big effect on my blogging. I no longer write Motu Proprio with any expectation of it being read in realtime; I think of posts as laying down markers for future citation, and as the penultimate draft for the Annuum, a yearly compendium of posts. That has in turn changed the nature of the posts: I try to think about what I need to include to make this post make sense a year from now. It's made the entire business much more serious and much more "written." And I think that's okay; years ago, Althouse seemed to have a burr under the saddle about blogs being "bloggy," as if the very nature of a blog dictated a certain form. I always thought that that was too constricting, an abridgment of another Althouse coinage, which I always took to be the real mission statement for bloggers, and the only real test for whether something was bloggy, viz. to live freely in writing. For me, the whole point of blogging is to write what I want when I want how I want, subject to neither editors nor deadlines. As things stand today, I feel like that's even more true than it was.
I will say that I think Twitter is a net negative for politics and public discourse, by the by, for reasons that other commenters have pointed to in recent weeks.
140 characters work some times. But too often it's like having two people go by and hearing a few snippets of conversation. THEY know what they're talking about.
I was never sure which was lamer, the commentariat at DC or the commentariat at Hot Air since Malkin sold it.
Google's Panda algorithm is hacking its way through the Web like a Kim Jong-un decree. Even Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable got penalized.
If you don't like Obama's do-gooding, you'll probably like the do-gooding by your defacto public knowledge base even less.
Ann Althouse said...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).
Their format is particularly poorly-suited for Kaus, as his page would show the first few sentences and you'd have to click through for the rest--but Kaus often had very short individual posts, so you'd click through, get more ads, wait for the page to load, and read one more sentence.
Clayton Hennesey said...If you don't like Obama's do-gooding, you'll probably like the do-gooding by your defacto public knowledge base even less.
Eh, I could always switch to Bing; swapping Admins is a bit more difficult.
I quit Twitter a long time ago. At first I liked it because it was terse. Then it became a fire hose of terse and more of a chat room than a bulletin board of pithy comments.
Twitter is not for commentary, really.
It's for customized news. For example, I work in advertising so I have one @ that is all about advertising. I have another that is all about writing/filmmaking. I follow only people who provide value. Sure, there's a lot to wade through, but I can learn things quickly.
You can use one account and create lists for different things, and then just view that list if you want to cut out unrelated clutter.
It's just a tool like any other.
Meerkat is the latest rage as SXSW. It allows you to stream live video to your Twitter followers.
I don't know enough about it yet to understand it's optimized value.
Twitter? Can't be bothered. Seems to be aimed at people who crave followers but, never having used it, that may be a misimpression.
This was odd: "Writers are blowing our time away on Twitter, and yet Twitter is killing blogging." Hadn't notice any sudden death syndrome on the sites I regularly visit. If it's killing off the dull ones, so much the better.
1500 words is enough for three op-eds. If a newspaper ran a 1500 word op-ed, even the most patient Talmudic scholars would decide TL;DR after about word #900. Amazing that Google thinks sloppy, undisciplined writing is best.
The Daily Caller's mobile interface is truly abysmal. I understand the need to "monetize" my click, but jeez, you literally can't read anything on that site for longer than a second or two before your screen is taken over by Hymie the always-be-closing robot.
I'm not sure I understand the problem with Twitter. It's mostly just links. I think Freeman Hunt is right in that the people who limit themselves to the 140 characters and don't point to links are just showing off a kind of faux pithiness that is usually just a form of trolling. But I think 80-90 percent of the tweets I am happy to see take you to articles of various lengths, and it's often surprising and worthwhile what you find.
Of course longer blog posts are favored in Google search results.
There are more search term to match!
Google's Panda algorithm is hacking its way through the Web like a Kim Jong-un decree. Even Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable got penalized.
If you don't like Obama's do-gooding, you'll probably like the do-gooding by your defacto public knowledge base even less.
visit https://textcounting.com/.
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