This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Python Buzz
by Aaron Brady.
Original Post: On Twitter, Blogs and Syndication
Feed Title: insom.me.uk
Feed URL: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/insommeuk
Feed Description: Posts related to using Python. Some tricks and tips, observations, hacks, and the Brand New Things.
I’ve been thinking about posting on how different the format is blogging when compared to Twitter. I’ve found Twitter addictive; there’s no pressure to right a long missive, to edit yourself or really to rise to any great standard. If you follow a reasonable amount of people, you can get into the habit of reading every single posting.
Lots of people who wouldn’t blog are active on Twitter, so the playing field seems more level, and if you can keep your follower and following numbers fairly balanced it has a great feeling of community with immediate feedback. I felt like that with blogging when I started, but getting picked up by Planet Python has been a double-edged sword. It makes you shy.
I don’t want to post too many personal things, not because I’m precious about my information but because I consider my blog to have a topic, whereas I don’t consider my Twitter to have one at all.
That said, I do want to keep my blog alive; I’ve just gone through the hassle of porting everything to Movable Type (with a little bit of disruption to anyone following or consuming my RSS feed), I wouldn’t have bothered if I was just going to let it languish or make one or two posts a year like I have in recent times.
So; I think it’s time to make the blog more accessible; it’s not about making one medium into another, but back when Planet Python was small (infact, back when there wasn’t one, and it was just a few blogs on MechanicalCat.net) you could write a blog entry and someone would reply within a day at which point you could reply again. It felt more like a conversation.
I said to Helen last night that I don’t see that you can have fun writing your blog unless you’re reading others and that there’s a chance for cross talk. I’m making it my business to read each posting via the Plant Python RSS feed (it’s actually scary that I nearly wrote ‘follow the RSS feed’) because if you’re not reading other peoples output then you actually aren’t part of the community.
(ObPython: I will be posting the Python source for my block device synchronisation tool, recently responsible for allowing me to migrate very large Xen snapshots over a reasonably slow link. I just want to clean it up first.)
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