Twitter Meets The Blog

How can we merge micro and major blogging?

Twitter, the now nearly de facto micro-blogging platform is great for what Olivia Mitchell has called twitterbites - a pithy and smart statement that summarizes a point, starts or continues a conversation. On the other hand, blogs are a great platform to develop a thought more fully and allow a collection of comments.

So, we have two excellent ways to converse - one more simultaneous and real time, the other more asynchronous and linear. If there were no link between the two, all would be fine. But tiny URLs create a bridge between the two worlds; spawned by a reader who found the post interesting or the author wanting to publicize the topic.

If I think a about a twitter-blog interface (and thanks to Danny Brown for provoking this line of thinking) - I see a potential for a different form than the traditional linear Post-Comment model of blogs.

A good post usually makes several points that warrant discussion and feedback. So rather than asking for comments on the whole thing what about calling out 'headlines', bullet points and comments as tweetbites - individual elements that can be sent to Twitter to move the conversation to that platform? This suggests that a post should have multiple links, each to various parts of the post, rather than one top level link.

Now this would probably change how we write - our English teachers may cringe. But if Google and Twitter are training us to scan rapidly and think in chunks then why not extend this to blog posting and put 'tweet this' throughout the post? This would also provide a way to find which elements of a post generate the most interest.

Another thought, a blog should capture the twitter stream of the comments linking to the post itself. That way we could see both worlds at the same time. Something like Cover it Live for example.