19 Reasons You Should Blog And Not Just Tweet

19 Reasons You Should Blog And Not Just Tweet


Unscientific observation:  most bloggers use Twitter, but many Twitter users do not blog.

Twitter is popular because it is easy.  It is easy to setup, easy to copy-paste links into, and easy to write 140 character bits.  But, having your own blog remains the strongest platform if you’re serious about sharing ideas and having a continued dialog with the world.  Blogging is the antithesis of easy, however it is far more rewarding.

I’m not saying Twitter isn’t a useful and interesting service, because it certainly is.  But it does not negate the real opportunity that is actually made more useful by the popularity of microblogging:  having your own blog.

Are you just using Twitter but not blogging?  You’re missing out.  Here’s why you should make a blog your home base and consider Twitter an outpost:

1.  Blogging demonstrates true commitment and passion to your industry that you really can’t fake long-term.  Most won’t be able to sustain it over long periods of time with frequency, but those who do so are rewarded in spades and stand out from the crowd.

2.  Old articles are valuable and still read years later, given infinite life by the engines.  Old Tweets live in archive purgatory where a majority will never be seen again.

3.  Remember, you’re essentially contributing to someone else’s network on Twitter - certainly there are returns, but make no mistake they profit from your attention.  I know you might not have a problem with that because you gain something too, but it’s good to be conscious of that fact.

4.  A compelling link in a blog entry will be clicked; links in Twitter are noise that in aggregate make up signal, but the reality is links in your stream aren’t the same as a post with a compelling link.

5.  Secret everyone knows:  most of Twitter is just linking to blogs and content on the open web.  Being the end product people are actually interested in and focus their attention on is where your ideas will be studied carefully, not in the cacophony of Twitter.

6.  You own your work in a self-hosted blog and are in total control over how it is presented.

7.  Twitter is in a sense social sticky notes, or the SMS of the Internet (however you want to consider it).  It’s snack-sized content.  Are you or your business interesting enough to provide the full course?  It’s telling who engages deeper vs. those who simply choose to engage 140 characters at a time.

8.  Cumulative results over time from blogging, each post incrementally adds value to your site as a whole.  Not necessarily true on Twitter.

9.  Full analytics with a blog.

10.  Multiple touch points to readership and interaction (email, RSS, on-site, etc.).

11.  Plugins let you add pretty much anything you want, can even integrate microblogging within your blog itself.

12.  Flexibility with layout.

13.  140 characters is often more than necessary - but also it is often less than necessary.

14.  Everyone on Twitter is looking for the next big thing or most interesting piece of content to link to.  Wouldn’t you rather be the big thing than merely another person pointing at it?

15.  These are all just tools to share content and ideas, no more, no less.  You need a cohesive strategy for all of them to drive conversions in one spot.  A blog is the perfect place for that if you want focused attention and to build an interested community.  What if any one network you don’t control falls out of favor or changes the rules?  At the end of the day, self-hosted blog owners control the vertical and the horizontal, whereas on Twitter or any external network you’re at the whim of someone else.

16.  I don’t even know why some people consider for a second that Twitter and FriendFeed will kill blogging, these ideas are pure linkbait and show a lack of understanding of the motivation of people on the open web.

17.  Careful of how much time you devote to Twitter instead of contributing to your own channel.  Spend the most time nurturing that - time spent in Twitter comes at the opportunity cost of fresh content to your blog.  You can use Twitter and other micro networks to draw subscribers and interest, but the premier value is in working on your own material in a unique space.

18.  RSS is alive and well - Steve Gillmor and the TC gang know how to write a great piece of linkbait, but that’s pretty much all it is.  Remember, they are in the business of generating buzz, links and pageviews through opinion pieces that ruffle the feathers of tech bloggers, and they’re good at it.  It’s entertainment value but I wouldn’t put too much stake in anything one person or site says, always look at the situation and landscape objectively.

19.  You are in control of when your blog goes into maintenance mode - not so with Twitter or really any free service.

Don’t get me wrong, I do like Twitter.  I’ve even taken the time to draft insights from using it as I think it’s a great service, however the biggest opportunity is still to develop a successful self-hosted blog.  This advice isn’t new - but I just got the feeling this week that it needs to be restated.  I know it’s not as “sexy” anymore but it is still far more valuable and should not be discounted merely because the early adopters have shiny new object syndrome.

Further reading to help push your blogging to the next level:

How To Successfully Integrate Blogging Into Your Busy Life

A Path To Rapid Growth: Find Your Formula

Make Your Site Known For Signal, Kill The Noise

Business Cards Suck: Try These Tools Instead - ReadWriteWeb

Business Cards Suck: Try These Tools Instead

Written by Jolie O'Dell / May 19, 2009 9:00 PM / 13 Comments

Business cards are a horror show. When it gets to the point that you have to either resort to a die-cut, motion-sentitive, titanium-plated laser show of a card or get your contact info embossed on beef jerky to avoid being forgotten in the trash heap of useless swag and Clif Bar crumbs at the bottom of some biz dev guy's carryon, we think it's safe to admit that the whole business card milieu needs an attitude adjustment.

Here are a few cool, tech-forward tools to ensure neither you nor your contact details are lost in the shuffle.

Now, there are a handful of iPhone apps for accomplishing the simultaneous, mutual relay of contact information between two parties; however, the tools we'll cover today are for the wider audience of people who are not rabid Mac fanboys and girls.

First, let's turn our attention to the MyNameIsE Connector, a nifty device that first came to our attention in this promotional video:

The Connectors work out of the box. Users touch the devices together to exchange information and download contacts later through a USB port. It's ridiculously simple. The Connector will be available for conferences and festivals, and the MyNameIsE tech is also available via a mobile site and several native apps.

A disturbingly similar device is the MingleStick.

Forgoing any juvenile remarks about the product name, we observe the point-click-download process is, indeed, the perfect solution for conferences and shows; you can check out the 'Sticks in action at a trade show in this video. Don't they make a lovely addition to those chic lanyards we all know and love? However, this particular product is likely to remain a conference-bound toy for a while. Although the web-based MingleManager service offers a nice array of address book/calendar/content sharing functions, there is no mobile functionality aside from the MingleSticks themselves.

Moving away from hardware, let's have a look at Dropcard. At this website, users can create free profiles with contact information, including websites and social networks. Upon meeting someone the user wants to keep in touch with, he texts the other person's email to 77950. The new contact is then sent the Dropcard user's profile information in an email and can save the information immediately to their address book. The best feature here is that it involves no effort on the new contact's part; he or she doesn't even need to have a phone handy. Think of it as good spam.

Two other SMS-based services are TextID and Contxts. The latter has been particularly in vogue at recent tech conferences. However, both services require the non-user (or new contact, if you will) to take action by texting a word (usually a username or similar identifier selected by the user) to an SMS shortcode. Contxt is a free service for sharing up to 140 characters, while TextID monthly plans range from $19.95 $79.95 and allow for sending just about any kind of information, including mobile websites, pictures, maps/directions, or brochures or menus.

As with any technological roundup, we're sure this post omits several wonderful products we didn't find; feel free to let us know about them in the comments.

And for the love of Mike, stop wasting trees and lining the bottom of that biz dev guy's carryon: Just say no to business cards.

Just when I started to think again about having business cards printed. I have able to survive without business cards for about 3 years now. Just make sure you have infromative e-mail signature and a profile on linked-in.

Nieuwe resultaten uit de Ultimate Twitter Studie - via @Frankwatching

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Nieuwe resultaten uit de Ultimate Twitter Studie

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door Annemieke Demuynck van InSites Consulting

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op donderdag 14 mei 2009 om 16:00 uur

logotwitter2TalkToChange en InSites Consulting hebben de grootste Twitter studie ooit opgezet en gaan na hoe mensen Twitter gebruiken. Op Ultimatetwitterstudy.com vind je live resultaten op de onderzoeksvragen die op Twitter gepost worden. En je kan zelf ook deelnemen.

Waarom starten op Twitter?

De hoofdredenen om te starten op Twitter zijn:

  • Uit nieuwsgierigheid: om te begrijpen waar de buzz overgaat, om het concept van het medium te begrijpen, om te ervaren hoe het kan gebruikt worden om je persoonlijk en professioneel leven te verrijken.
  • Mee zijn met het nieuws, algemeen en ook voor specifieke topics of interesses.
  • Peer pressure/aanbeveling, niet de enige zijn die niet mee is met de hype.
  • Networking met vrienden en professionele contacten, altijd connected zijn.
  • Jezelf onderscheiden van collega’s en vrienden: ‘I am on it, they aren’t yet!’

Twitter or Facebook?

Als je op het internet zoekt naar de aandacht die er wordt gegeven aan de strijd tussen Twitter en Facebook, dan krijg je 121.000.000 hits op Google. Het lijkt een ‘hot topic’ te zijn.

picture3Op basis van onze resultaten komen we tot volgende vergelijking:

Tweet: ‘Facebook is for people you know, twitter is for people with the same interests’

Sommige tweeps verwijzen naar het feit dat het voor Facebook heel makkelijk zou zijn om het Twitter model over te nemen:

Tweet: ‘Not that much difference, as soon as Facebook brings in hash tags and direct replies into its status update feature’

Als je de vergelijking hierboven bekijkt, denken we dat Twitter geen schrik moet hebben Facebook, maar schuilt het gevaar zich in LinkedIn die het Twittermodel zou kopiëren.

Wat is er negatief op Twitter?

picture1Information overload (’overload’ en ‘noise’) en spam followers zijn de grootste issues.

Veel gebruikers vermelden dat de web interface van Twitter niet echt toont waar ze naar op zoek zijn. Het mist diepgaande search en tracking opties, gedetailleerde profiel zoekopdrachten en profiling opties. Het is niet makkelijk @-replies op te volgen en te managen of om vrienden te zoeken die ook het platform gebruiken. Dit is de hoofdreden waarom veel mensen interfaces zoals TweetDeck gebruiken om het leven in de Twittersphere een beetje makkelijker te maken…

Naast dat wordt ook de onstabiliteit van de Twitter API en ook het feit dat Twitter relatief verslavend kan werken wordt ook aangehaald in sommige tweets.

Jakob Nielsen Critiques Twitter - BusinessWeek #yam

Check out this website I found at businessweek.com

I admired Jacob Nielsen, not sure if I still do, after his best selling Designing Web Usability, I believe he never reached that level on original thinking and insight again. So to critique Twitter and Twittering is a bit too much. It's a new medium, a new way of communicating. After the hype cycle, Twitter will be recognized as another means of communication, agenda setting and influencing tool. It is important that CEO's and others realize the impact of a / any medium and how to use it to their advantage. They need to be coached and trained for the specific medium. A job usually done by PR professionals. In a previous live I did my share of training CEO's and top execs on their media skills, it's great fun to prepare them for the rules of engagement with journalists and help them understand the art of interviewing. Get your message across in a win-win situation, dealing with the press , both for print media as well as commercial television. Remember there is no such thing as 'off-the-record'

Scoopler: real-time search for social content

Scoopler real-time searchScoopler is a brand new real-time search engine that aggregates and organizes content being shared on the Internet as it happens. It launched in Private Beta in April 2009 and in public beta on May 8.

How does it work?

Scoopler indexes live updates from services like Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and more. When you search for a topic on Scoopler, the search results in the middle column give you the most relevant results for your query, updated in real-time.

Scoopler extracts links, videos and images from the live feeds that are indexed and rank them based on how popular they are - i.e. how much they are being shared right now. In the right column, Scoopler presents a list of such popular items for your topic: news, videos and images.

But there is more to Scoopler than just real time search.

Click here to read the rest of this article!

Posted on Monday 11 May 2009
Filed under: All (summaries) and Online search tools and services and Social media | Permalink

Pandia Search Engine News

Woman searching the webTwitter is planning to improve its search engine in a radical way. Pandia argues that Google and Twitter need each other.

Twitter has many suitors, among them Apple and Microsoft. Still, regardless of how much we admire Apple, the match that really makes sense to us is the one between Twitter and Google.

The new Twitter search engine

This week Twitter’s Santosh Jayaram, previously manager of search quality operations for Google (GOOG), announced that the Twitter search engine will start indexing the content of pages included in tweets.

In practice this means that you can use the Twitter search engine not only to search the content of the microblog tweets themselves, but also the content of the articles people link to and recommend.

Twitter as a real-time intelligence source

This makes perfect sense, as the latest development has shown that people are using Twitter more and more as an intelligence tool, for following the latest trends and the hottest news, rather than for mindless “I am going to the store now” kind of chatter.

As Rafe Needleman of cnet observes:

“This will make Twitter Search a much more complete index of what’s happening in real time on the Web and make it an even more credible competitor to Google Search for people looking for very timely content.”

Twitter may strengthen Google search

Indeed! But this also demonstrates why a Google/Twitter marriage will make so much sense:

Click here to read the rest of this article!

Posted on Sunday 10 May 2009
Filed under: All (summaries) and Online search tools and services and Social media | Permalink

Clamor about Yammer: In-house micro-blog can unite far-flung staffers #yam

Clamor about Yammer: In-house micro-blog can unite far-flung staffers
By Lindsey Miller
lindseym@ragan.com

Twitter-esque service helps businesses foster collaboration across the nation — even around the globe

When staffers need to collaborate in close proximity, talking across a desk or over a cubicle wall might seem like a fine solution. But long-distance coordination limits your options: Conference calls and the requisite follow-ups? Inbox-clogging e-mails? A never-ending game of phone tag?

The internal micro-blogging service Yammer is a viable alternative. It’s like Twitter in some respects, but it has two advantages — it’s accessible only to designated employees, and there is no limit on the number of characters per blast.