Subject: Twitter character counts
From: npdoty@gmail.com
Date: 6/23/2009 10:22:00 AM

To: Dave Winer
Bcc: http://npdoty.name/bcc

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Hi Dave,

Re my sarcastic tweet:

More seriously though, I think you're right on, but that really you're identifying problems with blogging, not with microblogging.

If it were just as easy to communicate with a blog post as it is with Twitter, plus you could express longer thoughts with a blog post, then there'd be no reason to complain about Twitter's character counts. Twitter would simply be a joke, an inferior product completely dominated (that is, in all dimensions) by blogging software.

But it isn't just as easy. Part of it, as many have pointed out, is the small messages -- it's easy to write and easy to read because neither takes that much commitment. But I think there are other issues too, advantages of Twitter that we wish we had with blog posts.

• Replying on Twitter is way easier and more effective than replying with a blog post. Trackbacks are confusing, full of spam and much harder to use than a single character in front of a name.


• People are harder to find at arbitrary addresses than they are with a single username after "twitter.com/". (Like @chrismessina and others, I wish this weren't the case, but currently, I believe it is.)


• It's easier to be part of a trend just by typing a # and a word than tagging your blog post and hoping technorati picks it up.


• Republishing content is a trivially easy and widely-accepted practice. (I think this is why single-click re-blogging on tumblr is so popular too and why Google Reader's "share" feature is so compelling.) You can also push content to particular people with @mentions.


• Syndication and reading is handled in the same place as writing -- as soon as you sign up for one, you've signed up for the other. Even though Twitter syndication is inferior to RSS (Twitter is a single unreliable service; there's no tracking of what's read and unread across devices), I suspect more regular people use Twitter to keep track of all their friends than use an RSS aggregator.

I think it's not so much a problem that Twitter has a character limit as it is that blogging platforms don't have all these other advantages. Conversations happen easily and naturally on Twitter, despite the severe limitation of character counts. I'd love to see those same advantages in the blogging platforms we use every day -- something you know about first hand!

Anyway, thanks for starting the conversation, and for using both Twitter and your blog to do it.

Nick

Subject: Re: programmatic typesetting
From: npdoty@gmail.com
Date: 1/22/2009 01:21:00 AM

To: Sam Maurer
Cc: Timothy Paige
Bcc: http://npdoty.name/bcc

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Well, I guess the idea was that it wouldn't need any editing (or only to fix programmatic problems). That raises the question about what the true purpose of the project would be, but at least partially for me it's a statement about our communications -- that they can often be trivial, that the amount is huge, that the pieces are intermixed and formatted identically in my email client despite having such different characters or topics.

This distinction about how email has such a wide variety of topics and styles actually got me started thinking about another idea. What if I wrote a blog that was done in the format of emails that I sent to various people? So each post would be an email (like some of the more significant ones I send to you, or Tim O'Reilly, or friends at Microsoft, or whoever), complete with headers. I really like the idea of blog entries that have more metadata than just a title (who I chose to send to and CC and so on; the content of the email I'm responding to, etc.). Also, it harkens back to publishing an important person's letters as a journal of his life. (http://npdoty.name/bcc, say.)

On Jan 20, 2009, at 11:52 AM, Sam Maurer wrote:

Won't you need to edit the content quite a bit, as well as formatting it? I don't mean that you'll change what you wrote, but you'll need to pick which emails and plans to include, and in what order. Even if you want nearly everything, and you want it chronologically, maybe different themes of writing should be formatted differently, so that personal correspondence stands out from the ideas about information management or about liberal arts education. This part would take even longer than the formatting, right? But you could probably combine the editing with the difficult-to-automate parts of the typesetting, and do both at the same time without much added cost. (Also, this editing process may well be even more enjoyable than reading the finished product, since you'll have to engage with your old ideas in order to organize them.) As long as you do some simple pre-processing to separate entries clearly, format email headers properly, and so on, manual typesetting won't be that hard. You can just define some style sheets and then hit F-keys in BBEdit or InDesign as you go through the content.

I know that I'm subverting your intention to automate the process, but I think this would be a more pragmatic solution!

Sam