I think I trust your judgement on what’s tweetable vs what’s bloggable. But, I will say that with you as a blogger, if it’s important enough to say, it may be important enough to make a record of it and give it a better chance of being read. It’s too easy to miss tweets and tweets are certainly not nearly as permanent of a record. I say worth the experiment though.

Thanks Ryan. That’s another good perspective. I will continue pondering

I’ve personally struggled with how to handle reporting interesting or short “newsbytes” on Lifestream Blog without diluting more of my longer form posts. It’s not an easy nut to crack. Especially as you point out that many people may rely on the RSS feed and won’t be informed if they don’t religiously follow you on other channels.

For instance, I don’t read every tweet from people so I rely on collaborative filtering tools like Tweeted Times to bring me the top shared links on Twitter but in this case I may miss an edge news item if you only share it on Twitter. Anyways, not an easy issue to resolve.

You are still blogging.. only micro-blogging on Twitter. At the end it doesn’t matter if its long or short.

I’m a fan of folks who get the short version of the news out via Twitter and then follow up with a more in depth article. Give me the short version so I know that something happened, but continue to give me the meaty article that contains supporting/background material, links to relevant other resources, etc.

And the one big no-no (I don’t think I’ve ever seen you do this bu tothers are guilty) is to simply “tease” with a tweet about an article that is yet to come. That’s not helpful at all, and it’s one of the bad behaviors that certain TV stations in our area routinely practice. “Big scary thing might be killing you… tune in at 10 for the story!”

Are you teasing me on purpose? I do that all the time!

can u really provide the nuance and context needed – even in a “short” post – within the constraints of 140 characters? i think that’s the real question

That is a fair question! When you really consider the Context question – I’m going to say No, I Cannot. That makes me want to blog again after all!

You just need a medium that lets you share and curate links without restrictions of 140 chars

This does mean that writing future stories which build upon what seemed like minor news at the time will be more difficult. Finding a tweet you sent months ago is harder than finding a blog entry you posted months ago.

You seem to use Tweetdeck, and maybe its easier there.

I see what you did there

I think that the key to online content is SYNDICATION. As you know many people are in many places. Few people understand RSS but they are doing it now via Flipboard, Zite, and Flud.

I think if it is super important – it should be both places. Or ideally, write your title as a powerful tweet and let it move from the blog into Twitter so it can reach both places.

Many people cannot Twitter at work but can read Flipboard (which will follow Twitter but some don’t know that.)

To me, it is the matter of importance. If you want us to hear it from you first then I’d put it in both places. I know you’ll share and hopefully people will cite you.

The other problem is depth. Twitter is a slave to the current. The NOW. There are timeless items – things you want preserved next to your name. Things you want people to know if they come to your blog the old fashioned way.

So, I think that if it is important you should do both. OR use some sort of service that takes your favorited tweets and feeds them over here to your blog so people aren’t left out.

Including people is important. It is also important to realize that many are slaves to their firewall filters which are increasingly unfriendly to facebook and TWitter. As I work with my friends overseas we talk about not being “bandwidth” or “technology snobs” and assume that just because we have it that others have it too.

Ryan has an excellent point… To add to it is the issue of ownership! How often does quality content that we worked hard to source and present end up making more money for Facebook and Twitter because they have more ownership rights over it than we do?

Granted it’s easier to quickly post it to a social network than it is to go thru all the steps of blogging it, SEOing it, adding a compelling photo and then promoting / regularly referencing it… But how often do we promote or reference our Facebook wall posts and tweets?

The are many advantages to maintaining our online work in a fully owned, fully controlled, fully organized and easily accessible location!

Twitter and Facebook is not that!

And we all know what it’s like trying to find important content we posted on Twitter or Facebook months or even years ago because we don’t have a copy of it anywhere else…