robdale.ca

My sister lives about 4 kms from me. And yet, I see her and her family about five times a year. Typically, the only time we talk on the phone is when one of us needs a favour from the other. My brother lives in another city, and we will “facebook” each other a few times a year and will talk to each other on our birthdays and at Christmas. And yet, if you asked me if I was close to my sister and brother, I would tell you, “Absolutely!” In fact, we are very close. I love them deeply.

So, if I’m that pathetic in finding the time to communicate with my own family, you can imagine why I’m becoming more and more useless with blogging! In a sense, this is my place for sharing thoughts with all of you … and as you can see, my posts are becoming less and less frequent.

There have been some things keeping me busy. Once again, I’ve done a complete redesign of the Bikers’ Church Website. I like the new look, and it will save me hours of time in keeping it up to date. We are also going to be introducing a new blog over at the BC website, so keep your eyes peeled on it. You can easily subscribe to the BC website and get updates in your RSS reader, same as with this site.

I think blogging has changed. The blogs that have a specific purpose will survive, the others will slowly fade into irrelevance. Why? Because Twitter has taken over blogging (and Facebook). And while some day (probably sooner than we think), something will take the place of Twitter, for now, it seems to be the social network gaining the most attention.

I plan to keep blogging, but over the next few weeks, I need to really figure out what direction to go with robdale.ca. In the meantime, keep an eye out at the Bikers’ Church site, and consider following me on twitter.

Here’s an interesting article I read at tonymorganlive.com about twitter and blogging:

Last Thursday was a milestone day. For the first time since I’ve started using Twitter, the number of Twitter followers exceeded the number of people who are subscribed to my blog.

What’s amazing about that is how quickly Twitter useage has caught up with and then surpassed blogging. I’ve been blogging for 4 years now. I’ve only been on Twitter for about 18 months. Most of the growth on Twitter has happened within just the last 3 months.

The big question is why? Why is Twitter growing so rapidly? Here are a few theories I have:

• Twitter is easier to scan. Less is more. People gravitate to shorter messages.
• Twitter is more social. It’s easier to engage the crowd around a brief shot of wisdom or a story or a question.
• Twitter is more viral. It’s easy to grab an insight and share it with friends.
• Twitter is more intuitive. To follow someone, I just click “follow.” Blogs still require a bit of an understanding of RSS feeds.

I love to blog because I enjoy writing. Honestly, though, I’d rather Twitter. Part of the reason is that it’s more of a natural flow of what I’m experiencing, learning and processing. Part of the reason I prefer it is because the haters haven’t figured it out yet. People are friendlier and less divisive on Twitter than they are with my blog. I’m not sure why, but that’s currently the case.

What are your thoughts? Why do you think Twitter is growing so much faster than blogging?