I’ve turned off the plugin that automatically adds a daily digest of my twitter updates to my blog. I can’t imagine anyone feeling anything but relief about that decision.
There are three reasons why I decided to do this. The first is that (I think) it was reducing the chances of me feeling inclined to write an actual blog post. Why write on the blog when it already has all my tweets? We’ll see if that’s actually the case and I end up writing more now.
The second reason is a vague feeling that these twitter update posts were creating so much noise as to drown out the “real” posts. I may have a slightly inflated view of the importance of my blog posts.
The third and final reason is that twitter statuses and blog posts seem like very different communication media. It would be interesting to find out how people cross-post between blog, twitter, social media, etc. and why they do it. Anyone interested in doing a study with me? I’m thinking an online questionnaire with a few followup interviews.
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Hi Gregor,
I’ve been thinking the almost the same thing! I am still figuring out how I should be using all these different communication media. The last three months, I’ve been searching for tools to link different media so that I do not have to go in and out between different applications/tools to use different media. I only linked twitter and facebook, but even that, I’m not so sure whether I should be feeding my twitter to facebook…
Of course it’s up to individual how to use each medium, but I would love to find out types communication medium and how best they should be used (to improve the performance of different types of communication).
I do the same thing with Facebook and Twitter. I also use software - http://www.orsiso.com/ - that allows me, every time I send a message, to select which places to send it (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Friendster). There seem to be plenty of tools to do the sharing between the media.
A few years ago my wife did a study on how people use the IM status field to broadcast information ( http://grouplab.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/Publications/2005-DisplayNames.Group ) but now there are so many more popular options. I think it would be really interesting to find out how people are using these status fields. Are they using a bunch of different ones? If so, are they all the same, or are they used for different purposes?
Hi Gregor,
You could use Twitter Tools to compile your tweets into a weekly digest. There’s an option for it in the Twitter tools settings page.
I set this up for a site I have been working on today (http://pocketsmith.com/). Some time within the next week a blog post should pop up with a run down of their tweets for the week.
I’ve also setup their WordPress installation to send their blog posts to Twitter, then Twitter sends everything to FaceBook, then it goes full circle as I’ve added a FaceBook widget into their WordPress sidebar. Unfortunately that means there is the occasional blog post which ends up linked in their FaceBook widget but hopefully they’ll get drowned out by all the Tweets and FaceBook updates (I couldn’t be bothered custom building a system to filter out their blog posts before making their way back to WordPress).
To be honest, I assumed this site was JUST your tweets so I never bothered revisiting until now when I was sorting through my links page (http://ryanhellyer.net/links/) and decided to check if your site still existed (obviously it does).
Hi Ryan,
Thanks for the reminder about the twitter tools setting. I was hoping that not having content from twitter would motivate me into real blog posting. That doesn’t seem to have happened so maybe I’ll do the weekly digest thing as a compromise.
I’ll think about it for a bit.
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