Twitter as the death of blogging

(Warning: Navel gazing post about my blogging habits)

I tweeted yesterday:

(The blog word count is from the database for this blog. The twitter account is just a guesstimate based on the number of tweets I have).

Alex Cruise replied:

I thought this idea was particularly funny given that my blog productivity has been really high recently, but I wondered if there was any truth to it over all. It’s certainly an idea I’ve heard from a number of people over the years. I decided to investigate.

Here’s my blog output by year since I’ve started this blog:

Year Post count Word count
2005 17 10681
2006 28 20496
2007 71 21741
2008 62 30203
2009 69 25858
2010 29 14507
2011 40 23163
2012 51 34670

Spot the bit where I start using twitter and my blog volume goes way down?

No, me neither.

2005 was particularly quiet because I only had the blog for the last 3 months of it. 2010 because I was under NDA about what I was doing and had recently quit Scala, so I’d lost two significant sources of blogging, but all told my blog output seems to have stayed at a pretty consistent 20-30k words per year for most of the time I’ve had it.

I don’t think this surprising in retrospect. Most of the thoughts I put on twitter are stuff which is too short to be worth blogging about, and most of the thoughts I put on here are things that would be painful to condense into 140c. Are we worrying unnecessarily about “Twitter making us dumb”?

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