Ideas are irritants. When you have one, it itches your brain, which begins its defence mechanism. It builds around the idea with other thoughts and theories, protecting itself against the raw idea like an oyster protecting itself against a piece of grit.
Like an oyster, sometimes it ends up with a pearl.
Which is often how good blogging works. You have an idea during the day, and by the time you come to write it down it’s grown and blossomed into a fully fledged group of linked thoughts and concepts.
Except when you use Twitter. Rather than giving things time to grow and develop, Twitter lifts the irritant idea straight out of your head like a scuba-diving tick bird picking grit from an oyster. This is dangerous, and often ends with brains totally unable to invent realistic metaphors that don’t, for example, involve scuba-diving tick birds.
Okay, so Twitter isn’t really going to kill blogging, but it has forced me to think about how I can both blog and tweet without one spoiling the other. Twittering, despite the vast archives that are forming, feels ephemeral, and a lot of big ideas are being lost in the noise.
My tip is don’t multi-tweet. If you can’t fit everything you want into 140 chars then maybe it’s a bigger idea worth stewing over.
this EXACTLY what I’ve been thinking. are you me?
Mmmm… I actually wrote out and deleted the same blog post TWICE today, so as not to repeat or retweet myself…
And also… We’ve not forgotten about your baby stuff. We have an awful lot to sort through!!!
Hmm. Personally, I find that twittering is sometimes a kind of notepad for ideas that turn out to be something bigger. Though in my other work identity, it does seem to have completely ousted Facebook.
That is exactly what I have been struggling with lately and precisely why my blog has suffered. I gave myself a B+ must try harder. Thanks for popping by to mine.
…which is why I’ve avoided Twitter. Not every new thing and fad is positive. Why go to a mystery “bit like KFC but isn’t KFC” chicken shop when you can go to KFC? Why pass up on the decisive Ashes test match to see Sri Lanka play Ireland at 20/20? What if James Burke’s Connections hadn’t been 10 1 hour episodes but 6 10 minute ones? Twitter is just too throwaway for my liking