(Warning: Navel gazing post about my blogging habits)
I tweeted yesterday:
So I’ve got 181k words of published content on my blog and ~230k words of tweets. About 4 novels worth of me on the public internet. Yikes.
— David R. MacIver (@DRMacIver) December 12, 2012
(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:
@drmaciver as smartphones are the end of boredom, so Twitter is the end of long-form writing. Sadly boredom is often precursor to creativity
— Alex Cruise (@alexcruise) December 12, 2012
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”?