Heard From Telegraph Lines

Back at the end of last year I gave the blog a new layout when I realised I had been using an ancient template the whole time. The labels gadget prompted me to get the post tags in order whereupon I noticed there was a gap in the more academic topics between mid-2006 and the end of 2008. Interestingly enough, that was the period this blog lapsed into diary mode. I managed to get back on track in October 2008 when I laboured to produce five whole posts, but it wasn't until this year that I regained motivation by inverse resistance to the rise of microblogging. Since I've mastered Goggle Docs' spreadsheets, here's some illustrations:

The pie chart speaks for itself - the past 3.5 years is still dwarfed by the first 18 months. That's probably the average time a blog lasts. The following line graph clearly shows the erratic decline of the first year whereupon it hits bottom at the end of 2006. After than it only occasionally rises above the post a month baseline. Quantity and quality is a trade-off, but there wasn't an axis for quality...

"I made a graph."

To mark 250 posts and five years of this blog (and a return to form), I was thinking about nominating five posts as highlights. Then I remembered a one-man circle-jerk is something much worse.

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If you recall, the blogosphere was a few years ago hailed as the great communications revolution. Well I'm pretty sick of hearing about how Twitter has brought about a communications revolution (single handedly, no less). I can't help feeling that the medium is the message. The fact that people are twittering is the big story, not what is being said. And what is being said is as indepth as a semaphore dispatch, which is why status updates and breaking news headlines are one of the few real uses.

Doctorvee wrote earlier in the year that the major drawback of blogging was the thought and time required to craft what can amount to a short essay. That was a good thing, because the year-before-last's-Big-Brother-winner would quickly lose interest. Now we have a deluge of vapid tweets from airhead tweeters - exactly what the natural selection of blogging eliminated. As the twitterverse nicely self-organises into orators and audiences, the voices that were supposed to be amplified are instead drowned out. There are a lot of old-media names in this graphic of the most influential users. The barriers have been lowered. Speak your brains.

Whilst microblogging may allow you to get something out there immediately, it also allows anything to get out there. I wonder whether people are making a habit out of typing before thinking. If two of your braincells light up and you have a thought, just put it out there in 140 characters or less. And if it was half-arsed? Then tweet again correcting it, and so on in fits and starts - trains of thought become fragmentary sequences of post-scripts and addenda and now for something completely different.

Written March and June 2010 
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