Wouldn’t want it any other way
August 29th, 2009
8:30 p.m. on a Saturday night, and my beloved husband and I are on two different floors of the house, curled up with separate laptops and at least eight internet browser windows open (each).
Is this sad? Is this modern marriage (with children)? Is this exactly what I want to be doing right now?
The answer, perhaps to all three but certainly to the last question, is yes.
Would it make things worse if I told you our last conversation was a raging argument heated debate calm and logical discussion about Twitter?*
Yes, it’s a pretty dorky state of affairs over here, that’s for sure.
…..
*A calm and logical discussion in which I was absolutely and undeniably right, and during which my rational arguments and compelling rhetoric left Matt’s position as little more than a smoldering wreckage of ideas THAT WERE NOT RIGHT.
August 30th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
I’m intrigued: what was the discussion about Twitter about? This sounds in the realm of facebook discussions…
August 31st, 2009 at 3:48 pm
The discussion was about setting up an automatic feed from the blog to Twitter, so every time I post there would be a tweet announcing that fact and linking to the post. One of us was for, one against. The conversation spiraled from there into different philosophies of Twitter, which would be a whole other post. Maybe we’ll do a podcast of us arguing about it.
Maybe I should pause here and ask for more opinions — is the automatic update linking to every blog post equivalent to spam? Is this annoying? Is this a useful way for people to know when there’s a new post? What do you think?
August 31st, 2009 at 3:52 pm
I’m not sure on this one. I personally use a reader (Bloglines), so that keeps me up to date on when new posts are out there for blogs I read.
I do have a fan page for Cafe Cyan and post links to new blog entries as I assume some of my “fans” don’t use a reader nor do they regularly check my site.
I selectively tell Twitter peeps when a new post is up. I don’t want my updates to be all about my blog, I want them to supplement my blog. Make sense?
August 31st, 2009 at 6:59 pm
I see Twitter as complementing a blog as well. if someone posted to their blog 5 times per day and put the link on Twitter each time, that might get overwhelming, but I wouldn’t hold it against them. However, for those who post a 2-4 times per week, and tweet other items in between, I don’t think it’s too much and an easy way to inform folks to check out the site, and hopefully, get them to want to visit more.
Plus, it’s no coincidence when a name of a blog and the Twitter account is the same thing. The relationship is explicitly known, so I expect people won’t mind a link announcing something new on the blog. They’re followers for a reason and are interested in what you say. And a tweet is easy to just pass over at the time, if they so choose.
August 31st, 2009 at 7:29 pm
Aaaand now you know which side of the debate Matt was on. Here’s my side:
I think of Twitter as micro-blogging, a shortened version of what I write about here. I tweet about little things that I find amusing or comment-worthy but not worth a whole blog post. I will sometimes tweet a link to a blog post, but I try to make the tweet add something, not just announce that a new post is up.
I also believe that anyone who hangs out on the internet enough to use Twitter also knows how to use a feed reader and/or bookmarks. I don’t want to bombard people with READ CATNAMEDPIG messages. That’s why I asked Matt to undo the automatic update thing he set up for @catnamedpig.
Others reading — we’re interested in more opinions. Leave us a comment, e-mail or @ reply (contact info in right sidebar).
September 1st, 2009 at 5:04 am
I would suspect that almost 100% of your Twitter followers are friends, most of whom check on this website routinely for updates anyhow…so Twitter might be unnecessary. My vote is no on automatic notifications (and those creepy people who follow you on twitter who you have no idea who they are…would you want to let them know about your site updates anyway?).
I also strongly suspect that if you look at your webpage stats, you have ups and downs on number of daily hits, but the number of consistent readers stays roughly the same. If you are looking to increase this number (hence the Twitter notifications), my best suggestion from experience would be to create blog topics that appeal to a large audience. The most successful attempts include PerezHilton, OliviaMunn, gizmodo, and so on, who post about celebrity gossip and upcoming techno-nerdy things. These strategies will achieve hits when someone comes across them on a search engine…I don’t think the same success will come from mostly personal family-based topics. My most viewed posts came when I blogged about replacing drywall in a basement and installing a subfloor for ceramic tile.
That said, I strongly advocate against doing this – the committed readers you have are here because of the content already contained…and these are the friends you really want to keep anyhow.
September 1st, 2009 at 11:13 am
Rest assured, no plans in the works to turn catnamedpig.com into a celebrity gossip or tech site. We are, however, interested in offering a user-friendly reading experience, which was what prompted the whole discussion in the first place. Matt and I just had different ideas of what we considered “user-friendly.”
I think for now we are agreeing to disagree and each using our Twitter feeds as we see fit. (If you follow Matt, expect update tweets whenever he weighs in here.)