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Twitter thoughts and blog neglect

Trending_15July2009I realised today that this blog has been rather neglected and while there are the usual way-too-busy reasons (all of which remain true!) I’ve noticed I’m spending more and more time looking at Twitter and less and less actually writing anything here; actually, I’m a fairly tweet-low Twitterer, too, I think – I read a lot more than I write.  As I was pondering this, the core value of Twitter – it’s immediacy – really hit home as I found out about the major earthquake off the cost of New Zealand’s South Island (near Dunedin, where I was born and where my grandparents still live) via Twitter, and the ensuing Tsunami Warning (which makes an earthquake seem a lot scarier!).  It took any mainstream news media, or blogs, that I read more than half an hour, and more than an hour for most, to break this story.  By then, I’d had my little worried moment, reassured myself that the Tsunami (which, thankfully, never happened) wouldn’t hit my grandparents since they live up a hill, and returned to work.  By then ‘New Zealand’ and ‘Tsunami Warning’ were both Trending Topics, second only to Harry Potter on the back of the film debut of the sixth feature.  Of course, following the links from the Trending Topics, I also accidentally hit spoilers regarding tonight’s episode of the Master Chef finals; time to go Justine, it seems (like the US, the East Coast of Australia, is 2 hours ahead those of us in the West, so Twitter is a rather potent spoiler source). 

In turn, I suspect Twitter is rapidly becoming normalised as part of the everyday conversation for all sorts of folks, not just social media addicts.  Indeed, I was amused to read Melissa Gregg’s post about an episode of Desperate Housewives including a character who fails to get a job due to their lack of Twitter-knowledge!  Perhaps in a future episode said character might change their fortune by stumbling across this useful History(ish) of Twitter diagram.  In the mean time, I’ll see if I can work out a better balance between the lifestreaming deluge of Twitter and my neglected but still loved blog. 

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