The rush to the Twittersphere is provoking interesting thoughts amongst the bloggerati (I’m trying to squeeze in as many horrific coinages as possible here). The most amusing one, to me, is the clarion call to arms by some bloggers. Don’t forget the blog, they say (and twit and blog), where contemplation and thought win out over the ephemeral and impulsive! I agree that we should always be questioning our types and forms of discourse, but casting the blog as a practically traditional force is kind of funny. Wasn’t it just a few years ago that blogs were being singled out because they were too ephemeral and constant complaints being aired about the lack of thought that went into such easy publishing? And before that wasn’t it the death of the essay and long form news? What about epic poems? Where is our Homer (and I don’t mean Homer Simpson)?

I question the basic assumption that posting to Twitter is robbing blogs of their vigor. More specifically, I would suggest that the attraction to Twittering that seems to be replacing blogging is not necessarily a matter of people putting in less intellectual effort, as some of the worrying implies, but is a sign that some of the conversation that was being forced into the blog form is more suited to tools like Twitter, which are more analagous to “real” conversation with its fits and starts, dead ends and resumptions, meanders and razor sharp retorts.

I’m blogging less than I did before Twitter, but that’s because Twitter most often allows me to express what I want to express. I don’t need to puff thoughts up into entries suitable for the blogging form (as it has come to be understood), reserving this space for incredibly intellectual and compelling posts like this one…