Trust Tommy

See, if this were a normal Monday, now, I’d be just finishing up Geography, and heading toward religion. Except it’s not, and I’m at home, so I’m happy.

Anyway. On my way to CentreStage on Saturday, I read a fantastic article on Expad.ie, about the whole Twitter vs. Blogs scenario.

This entire debate has been going ever since Twitter started up. Is it a viable alternative to blogging? Is it better than blogging in the long run? Will we see a Harry Potter-Voldemort climax of ‘neither can live while the other survives’?

Yes, depends, and no.

Yes, it is a viable alternative to blogging. I have about 370 posts on Trust Tommy. I passed 5,000 tweets yesterday. I tweet a lot more then I blog, it’s apparent. That’s because they’re completely different things. Tweeting doesn’t really require effort – you just answer a simple question or say what you’re thinking and you’re off. You can do it in your sleep. Blogging, on the other hand, needs thought before it, the time to actually write it.. reading over it for typos or grammatical errors and then finally publishing. I can bang off a tweet in 30 seconds, but I’ll take at least 30 minutes to compose a post.

Is it better than blogging in the long run? Good question. Because tweeting takes so little time and effort, both to set up and to use, it’s popular among people who don’t have a lot of time to spare. If it’s just a quick ‘Morning all, on the tube’ tweet in the morning to (heaven forbid) ‘finally sat down with dinner and Coronation Street’ in the evenings, it doesn’t take much thought, time and effort.

Therefore, I think, blogging is more suited to those who are on a computer regularly and have a lot of time. You need to be able to sit down and put fingers to keys. Blogging isn’t (or shouldn’t) be something hurriedly tapped out on an iPhone on the way to work on the bus.

Lastly, will we see a Harry Potter-Voldemort climax of ‘neither can live while the other survives’?

While this’d be quite cool, I don’t think so, for the reasons stated above. Tweeting suits the people who are short on time and are good at condensing their thoughts into manageable, 140 character bite-sized chunks, while blogging is for those of us (and it’s been said of me) who suffer from verbal diarrhea.

And I just made blogging so horribly uncool there. Do forgive me.