[OPLIN 4cast] OPLIN 4Cast #218: Blog posts vs. social media posts

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OPLIN 4Cast

OPLIN 4Cast #218: Blog posts vs. social media posts
February 23rd, 2011

<http://www.oplin.org/4cast/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/blog_demise.png>Many 
people think the recent protests and changes of government 
in the Middle East have been enabled by widespread use of 
Facebook and Twitter, and you may even have heard these 
upheavals called "Facebook revolutions." This is certainly a 
very different use of social media than the more common 
status updates that inform the world of nothing more 
momentous than what someone ate for breakfast; this is 
social media used for broadcasting news and ideas, things 
that used to be the domain of blogs. These days, blogging 
seems to be waning while tweeting is becoming more 
important. (Recent /4cast/ blog postings, for example, are 
also summarized in Twitter and Facebook postings, which was 
not the practice when the /4cast/ was started about four 
years ago.) This subtle change in the way social media is 
used might result in changes to the social media itself.

    * Blogs wane as the young drift to sites like Twitter
      <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/technology/internet/21blog.html>
      (New York Times/Verne G. Kopytoff) "Among
      18-to-33-year-olds [...] blogging dropped two
      percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier.
      Former bloggers said they were too busy to write
      lengthy posts and were uninspired by a lack of
      readers. Others said they had no interest in creating
      a blog because social networking did a good enough job
      keeping them in touch with friends and family."
    * It's Facebook vs. Twitter in the race to make the news
      social
      <http://gigaom.com/2011/02/11/its-facebook-vs-twitter-in-the-race-to-make-the-news-social/>
      (GigaOM/Mathew Ingram) "At one point not that long
      ago, it looked like Facebook might be trying to become
      a news platform in a different way, by aggregating
      news itself, as a way of becoming a sort of
      personalized newspaper for users. There were some
      initial moves in that direction that didn't really go
      anywhere, and then more recently the network launched
      something it called 'community pages,' which aggregate
      posts based on topic keywords and looked as though
      they could become a news aggregation service."
    * Why Twitter must expand beyond 140 characters
      <http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_twitter_must_expand_beyond_140_characters.php>
      (ReadWriteWeb/Richard MacManus) "When Twitter launched
      its re-design
      <http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_gets_a_new_homepage_-_its_a_whole_thing.php>
      in March last year, it adjusted to this increase of
      multimedia by enabling users of Twitter.com (still how
      the vast majority of people consume Twitter content)
      to view photos and video within Twitter's website. It
      was a relatively small, but significant, step to
      lessen the burden of viewing multimedia content within
      Twitter. [...] It seems only a matter of time before
      Twitter enables users to view 'long tweets' within
      Twitter.com, in the same way that users can view
      videos and photos within the site."
    * Why Twitter should never expand beyond 140 characters
      <http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/02/21/why-twitter-should-never-expand-beyond-140-characters/>
      (TheNextWeb/Francis Tan) "There's actually a reason
      <http://www.140characters.com/2009/01/30/how-twitter-was-born/>
      behind the not-so-arbitrary 140 character limit of
      Twitter and that is simply to fit in an SMS message.
      It's a limitation that actually defines and sets
      Twitter apart from other services in so many good
      ways. It is easier to consume, cheaper in terms of
      SMS/data sent and received, and it actually encourages
      people to get straight to the point."

*/Ohio blog fact:/*

You don't have to look far for an example of a news blog 
that is enhanced (replaced?) by social media postings. If 
you are interested in Ohio political news, you may be a 
reader of Marc Kovac's Capital Blog 
<http://blogs.dixcdn.com/capitalblog/>, but followers of his 
tweets (@OhioCapitalBlog) are also getting a lot of very 
timely political news---though admittedly, a good many of 
Mr. Kovac's tweets only concern his favorite hot beverage.
------------------------------------------------------------
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