Posts Tagged metablogging

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.