Blogging is microblogging's (sad) grandpa.

by desmayoralgo (entry #1)

I started my love affair with blogging some four, five years ago. Name a platform: Blogger, LiveJournal, Vox Six-Apart, Wordpress. I've abused all of them at least once for a period not shorter than twenty-one days. But am I still irreversibly attached to them? No. As one of my friends said when I asked him to resurrect his blog some time back: That's so Web 1.0. (That got a laugh out of me even though, technically speaking, Web 1.0 is more closely associated with Netscape and Encarta.)

But really. I get his point. No one really wants to hear about your day in six paragraphs. Look at it this way: There's just so much information out there and so little time to absorb it all. I mean, you leave your Facebook page alone for five minutes and what do you get? 300+ updates on your Live Feed. Then you ask yourself: Is anyone going to read a five-inch discourse on that Phoenix concert you watched in Sydney? Probably not. There's just no time.

Enter the answer to everything: MICROBLOGGING. A microblog differs from your traditional, over-the-counter blog in that it is smaller in size. (Not that you couldn't infer that from the word micro.) But seriously. We're really talking micro. One entry could consist of a single sentence (one hundred forty characters if you're on Twitter), an image, or a ten-second video. It's vital that you keep things short -- or your reader jumps to the next update.

What makes microblogging so attractive? Interactivity, customizability and ease of use. Take for example Tumblr. (Although the same can be said about Twitter and Facebook.) Users are able to "follow" other users and see their posts together on their dashboard, "like" or "reblog" other blogs on the site. Entries can be submitted through a variety of means -- even through text messaging. Also, entries are protected to a certain degree -- you control your readers.

Sounds good? You bet. Because microblogging is what you make of it. It allows you to tap into the thoughts and lives of any number of people. And not just normal people but, more importantly, celebrities. (Lady Gaga, anyone?) All that minus the cyberclutter.