The unheated Venice warehouse, once filled with surly millennial coders, lies silent, its floor littered with empty bottles of $12 juice. ….Maybe he doesn't want me to link. Except since he's not being pompous...
The purpose of the rebuild is to (again) mix tweets with blog items, a rebellion against the disastrous early Word Press era in which blog posts became discrete, pompous hey-link-to-me declarations.
Ben Smith may think this was the golden age of blogging. To me it was the beginning of the end. …If the end already happened, how can you go back? I guess it's: Make blogging great again.
I’m sure I’ll screw things up for a while. There will still be many more tweets than blog items, though a) I’ll try to write more of the latter especially since b) it should now be possible to easily expand tweets into short (or long) blog entries. Will escaping the 140 character limitation make them better or worse? I actually don’t know. Could be worse! It’s awfully easy to kill a tweet with improvements.It's hard to blog and tweet. You either have blog mind or tweet mind. I know that blogging made me not want to write law review articles. You get a sense of where you want to be on the continuum from stark terseness to explain-it-all blabbery. If you're going to write a lot, you're probably going to find your place. But when Kaus blogged in the Golden Age of Blogging, he was in a pretty terse place on the continuum. Maybe he can jump back and forth.
But there are 2 ways to characterize blog/tweet jumping. One is what he's saying. Twitter predominates, and the blog is a place where you can expand on what you've already said in the tweet.
The other way is to blog first. Blog where you are free to say what you have to say and make the tweet second. The blog post is not an expansion of the tweet. The tweet is a condensation of the blog post. Kaus's Golden Age blog was always terse and tweet-like, but it was terse because of Kaus's own style, not because the format imposed terseness on him.
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22 comments:
Twitter is for the comedic analogy best for one liners. If that is one's talent go for Twitter.
I'm glad Kaus is moving away from Twitter, or Twitter-only.
I successfully avoided Twitter until the middle of last year--I don't like the format, I don't like the threading style, and I don't like that some significant portion of the tweets I'm reading responses to are deleted/unviewable. It certainly seems like the medium of choice for lots of Media and writer-type people, though, and leading up to the election I started browsing more and more. Still not my favorite, and Kaus' arguments usually merit more than 140 characters.
Kaus is too lazy to make this, or anything else, work well. I assume he has a trust fund.
Twitter good: Immediate.
Twitter bad: Monetize.
Blogger good: Literary.
Blogger bad: Monetize.
Google's search ranking algorithms take a dim view of posts shorter than 300 or so words. Except for those on its own Blogger property, of course.
Kaus would be wise not to mix Tweets on his blog or, if he does, apply a noindex metatag to them to pacify the Google dragon.
The biggest thing I've missed from Kaus is his car stuff. I liked his take on cars.
I am with Hoodlum on the twitter/tweeting. It is chaotic and seems to be missing a lot of information. Back and forth's between people who know each other, that make me feel like a clueless outsider at a cocktail party where everyone is using inside jokes and inside references. So you just stand there, drink in hand, trying to figure out wtf everyone is talking about.
I generally, just look and go ...ah....screw it. Then try to find some blog article that goes into more depth.
Known Unknown said...
The biggest thing I've missed from Kaus is his car stuff. I liked his take on cars.
Too much work. Actually have to leave the house on occasion.
Only birdbrains tweet.
Of course, there are some very cunning birds.
What DBQ said and also;
I want two things. Depth and comments. It's why Althouse is a multiple stop per day place.
What I think of Twitter.
"What I think of Twitter."
That's a great clip.
I found that unexpectedly moving (in addition to being brilliant visually and musically and very funny). It was surprised to be suddenly brought to tears at the use of the evidence that the old man had left the library to the town but the BOOKS to the librarian.
The women thought Marian had a sexual relationship with the man, but the man cared about preserving the books and, we realize, only the librarian could be trusted not to destroy them
Kaus is insightful but he never seemed to flesh out his ideas, a poke with no follow up.
I think that writers write, whether it's tweets, essays, sermons, songs, or blog posts. They may do more of one than the others, but they're not mutually exclusive.
Presumably, law review articles undergo a more rigorous process before publication than blog posts do.
" I know that blogging made me not want to write law review articles."
Just being on law review made me not want to write any more law review articles, and that was 40 years before blogging.
AReasonableMan said...Kaus is too lazy to make this, or anything else, work well. I assume he has a trust fund.
Hey man, he ran for office! That takes some effort, I think, and even if he only got a few votes those were still votes that didn't go to Barbara Boxer, so that's something. He went to law school (Harvard or Yale I think) and I understand that takes a bit of work, too.
Have you read his book The End of Equality? It's pretty good--I read it back in 2008 or so and even though it was old the core ideas still had a lot of resonance. I'm sure it's available on Amazon, through the Althouse portal even.
SOMETIMES a Tweet is a cogent, brief, analysis of a currently important topic.
USUALLY a Tweet lacks sufficient context to be comprehended, is simply an incoherent rant, or both.
When "news" chatterers commence chattering about Tweets, which is FAR too often, they are purged from Hammond's screen.
Iowahawk is one of the better known wits of twitter. He's good at it, with lots of followers and eyeballs. But . . . when Iowahawk wrote a blog years ago, wow. The funniest stuff I ever read on the web. His Archbishop of Canterbury Tales . . . I think a writer can pick one or the other and excel. Not both.
HoodlumDoodlum said...
Have you read his book
He's not a dummy, just lazy. If I had a trust fund I might be lazy too.
do it wretchard's way, tweet interesting news, comment on it via tweets, then blog about it later.
Poll results preserved here.
"do it wretchard's way, tweet interesting news, comment on it via tweets, then blog about it later."
You'd have to pay me a lot to do it that way.
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