Non, je ne regrette rien!

Aside from the odd hilarious metaphor, what's the difference between your post and the following Tweet: "I don't get Twitter. Someone explain?" ?

Could discuss why I think it's an interesting idea, derive a certain amount of enjoyment from it and what it provides that more traditional blogging mechanisms don't. Fundamentally though, until we've resolved:
The problem with that argument, of course, is that the medium itself dictates the content.
I don't see much point. Affects? Sure. Restricts, contains, </i>dictates</i>? Absolute arse. To take the obvious example, do Haiku not count as poetry any more? Discarding poetry/writing competitions as "not real poetry" simply because they takes place on Twitter is Begging the Question. Tsk.

The Printing Press didn't kill writing. Word processing didn't kill writing. Email didn't kill writing. Blogging didn't kill writing. They've all been accused of it. Before you toll the still reverberating death-knell once more, wouldn't it be worth maybe thinking it through a bit more?

ITALIC TAGS HAVE KILLED WRITING!

Tags and smilies between them have, indeed.

The difference is exactly that - the odd hilarious metaphor. There's content, not just a question. The blog post is part of a discussion. It's got something to say - even if it's been said before, it's never been said quite the same. It made you laugh, by the sound of it. It got you thinking about how you feel and what you think. Tell Obama and Palin that eloquence doesn't make a difference.

"I don't get Twitter. Someone explain?" provokes nothing but a stock answer, which is all the asker wants. It's a request that somebody else make decisions for them, explain what's going on so they don't have to think for themselves. There's no discourse, just call and response.

As for 'dictate', it was a poor choice of word but it's not entirely untrue. 'Affects' is better, I'll admit. But to illustrate the point, look at movie violence - compare Kung Fu Panda and Fight Club, or an Arnie action movie with the Bourne Supremacy. They're all violent films, aren't they? But the conventions of genre dictate the audience's emotional response to the violence, far more than the actual content. They teach us how to respond to it, and what to expect. Kids would be horrified by the level of violence in Kung Fu Panda, if it followed the genre conventions Fight Club obeys.

It's not that genre and medium dictate content - I mis-spoke. They dicate the way in which the audience interpret that content, which can be even more important.

As for the poetry example, obviously I'm not saying Haiku aren't real poems. They're about the only literary form you can fit in a twittering. What I'm questioning is not the validity of the poetry, but the sense of a desperate need for self-validation that comes from hosting a haiku contest on Twitter and trumpeting it as meaningful in its own right. No, it's just a haiku contest. You wouldn't celebrate such a competition where entries had to be written on post-it notes as distinct and significant, would you?

And finally, I didn't suggest Twitter could kill writing. I think the last surviving person on the glowing radioactive ruins on the Earth will be carving 'Bob waz here' into the charred concrete with his mutant heat vision.

What I said was that it steered people away from really thinking about what they're writing. When a medium exists for the sole purpose of allowing quick, pithy status updates, it doesn't exactly reward careful, considered thought. You, for example, used to post some really interesting blogs before you went native. Now all we get is random twitterings, and we're poorer for it.

Hi, I'm Ian, and I'm an alcoh Twitter user. Now the caffeine's kicked in, I should probably throw my two cents in.

I'll start with its impact on blogging - I'm not sure Twitter and its clones are the death of well thought-out, reasoned blogging (like the above). There's still space for that, there's still plenty of things people want to express that have trouble fitting in 14,000 characters let alone 140. What Twitter is the death of is the kind of "what I did today" blogging that 90% of bloggers - myself included - are guilty of.

In that respect, the 140-character word limit is a blessing - with a medium such as LiveJournal, one is tempted to post lengthy paragraphs of what one has been up to or how one feels. Often the reader gets a way in to these before realising "actually, I don't care, nothing of interest is being said here". Skip to next entry. Hell knows, I've posted enough multi-paragraph wangst on LJ that I can't imagine more than two or three people giving a damn about - yet it appears on 100 people's friends lists. 100 people must parse my post for meaning and relevancy before they proceed to the next one. Because some people post meaningful things on their LJ, you feel compelled to wade through the tripe in case there's something interesting below it.

Twitter, on the other hand, doesn't matter. There's no flowers amongst the weeds that you ought to pick through it for, and if you ignore Twitter for days or weeks you've missed nothing of real value. Instead, it's more of a public Instant Messaging format. The interest isn't in the status updates like "Going to the shops now", it's in the conversations that ensue, and in being public it often becomes more interesting than IM. Generally one starts an IM conversation with someone about something in particular, and apart from some pleasantries and catching-up, that's where the conversation stays. But because a dozen or more people can see that "IM" conversation on Twitter, more people jump in and make the conversation more interesting.

Plus, one of my main uses of it is for sharing interesting things I've discovered on the 'net. Rather than IMing people (impossible from work, plus picking people who would be interested and copy-pasting the link in multiple IM windows) or blogging (where the format compels you to spend time describing what the link is and why you found it interesting) - paste the link into Twitter, click Send, job done. Everyone can see it, and if they're in the mood to follow links to what their friends are looking at, they can. If not, tweets are easily ignored.

Now Twitter has killed my blogging, it's true. But as I see it, that's probably for the best. I so rarely had anything meaningful to say, just a paragraph of angst about subject X or pointless meme Y. Whether my lack of meaningful, blog-worthy thoughts is a bad reflection on me or where my life has taken me is probably up for debate, but it's that that causes people to stop blogging, not Twitter.

And Twitter certainly hasn't killed non-blog writing as far as I've noticed - certainly I've written more fiction in the six months or so since I started using Twitter than I have in the rest of the time since I left Uni and my free time disappeared down a gaping black void of responsibility.

It's quite possible, though, that blogging is returning to its early days of actual writing - mostly irrelevant status updates have moved to Twitter, irritating memes to Facebook and MySpace. My only worry as a mostly-passive consumer of blogs (and thus probably a bilge-rat of the Good Ship Blogosphere) is that with fewer and fewer people bothering to write their drivel in blogs, is there enough pressure to keep the other kind of blogging, actually thoughtful and meaningful stuff, alive?

Right, fetch me a hundred tins of Spaghetti-Os and forty pounds of bat droppings. I've got me a statue to build! And possibly Twitter about.

Sorry, been AWOL from t'internet these last few days. New toys...

Some interesting points. I think you're right about Twitter clearing the blogoshpere to a certain extent - instead of page-long blog posts about the qyoot guy at work which nobody bothers reading, you get succinct status updates. Which people might actually read. And it does indeed leave blogs clear for more noteworthy postage, should the mood take you, as well as clearing away the chaff.

So yeah, you're right - the distinction is a positive thing. It's just a shame that, as in your case, it's replaced blogging for some people. You say you can just post a link to something cool and job done, but personally I'm as much interested in your take on it as I am in the thing itself. Why do you think it's interesting? What's your opinion? You don't get any of that on Twitter.

Problem is, most of the time I stumble upon interesting things on the interweb, I'm at work and feel guilty enough about having surfed something completely non-work-related, let alone putting pen to paper regarding the subject! =p

second tsuki's comments; twitter is not about (micro)blogging but status-updates. i find it a great way to rant (particularly when at work) while keeping it amusing and not annoying people.

for me, the key difference between twitter and blogging is that twitter is in real time, and blogging is retrospective and more thoughtful process.

i would blog more, but i don't really have anything to say.

what i will finish with though, is that i think people should turn off the LJ posting twitter dumper thing. it does not really bother me; it just seems somewhat pointless.

The LJ twitter dumper is what inspired this post, to be honest. I looked at my friends page and the only posts which weren't Twitterings were the syndicated feeds from Neil Gaiman's blog. Which I found rather depressing. I realised how much I missed the interesting things people used to write about.

I don't think people give themselves enough credit - most internet-savvy folks are decent enough writers, and their breadth of experience of the net's darkest recesses must unearth cool things all the time. I'm not exactly the most adventurous of websplorers, and I find something shiny pretty much every day. Cthulu only knows what you lot must come across...

So tell me about it. At length, please. I'm interested.

I'm not really a fan of Twitter either. But I've learned to put up with it. It's better than nothing. Some people don't have time to sit and write out properly worded posts, or the will to do it. Sure I miss them but I get that people are busy. Being able to blat out a quick sentence knowing it won't take long makes people more likely to post.

It can be really irritating. Most comments really don't make sense without being put into context, which is hard to achieve in the tiny space. Frequently Twitter feeds contain half of a conversation that makes very little sense without its other half, which gives you the feeling that it wasn't intended to be read by you at all. I confess, I skim Twitter posts rather than reading them properly.

But it's nice to know what people are up to. I don't tend to use IM or my phone often, (I'm quiet like that) so I usually miss the little things.

I guess at the end of all that, what I'm trying to say (in a somewhat muddled fashion) is I don't like Twitter, but I accept it. It's a shame that it's replacing blogging rather than being used alongside it, but you can't have it all.

And re-reading that I totally didn't get my point across about how I'm actually in the anti-Twitter camp too. I'm not brilliant at this writing thing :) I think because I've complained about it before I've left that part out and jumped straight to the tolerance bit. I know what I mean.

I got the gist. And I think you're right - it's a convenience thing, most likely. But the problem with that is the unthinking aspect - it is possible to make 150 characters interesting, or amusing, with a bit of effort. But most people don't.

And then, yes, you get the half-conversations. Which are the most annoying aspect, from my perspective. It's like publishing a transcript of half a telephone conversation - no good to anyone. If there's something to share, share it. If not...