microblogging (and my secret superpower)

Working at home, my head in the sunshine and my screen in the shade, I have an hour before my next phone meeting, and think, "maybe that's enough time to finally write that little blog post that's been percolating in my mind for a while, in the more-than-two-months since I've posted anything..."

And then, instead of writing, I glance through the new issue of Wired magazine that came in the mail yesterday and discover that they wrote my blog post for me. Click through to read it - it's really not very long! - it starts off, "Kill Your Blog. Still posting like it's 2004? Well, knock it off. There are chirpier ways to get your word out," and goes on to talk about how even (especially) early famous bloggers are putting more of their time and thoughts and photos and videos onto Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, etc. They're talking about me! 

Well, except for the early and famous parts. 

I started blogging in 2004! I've been neglecting my blog in favor of tweeting and facebooking and flickring!



(Hey! This is my secret Superpower: I always swerve right into the belly of the Zeitgeist - or, that is, right in the middle of the road, right in the middle of bell curve, right with the crowd on the cresting wave. Or maybe just a little little bit behind. My brother-in-law Eric has pointed out to me that it is theoretically a valuable talent to be able to pick out the song on any album that the masses of everyone else would like the best too. Or maybe not valuable, but a talent nonetheless.)



(Actually, I am pretty sure that I have other genius superpowers like that, but for some reason I have forgotten what they are.)



So, what I was going to write, even before I read that little article in Wired, was that I haven't been spending any time thinking about my own blog (and not a lot of time reading other people's blogs, not even my favorite ones) because the scant amount of time I have for online connecting is all being used up by what I'm thinking of as minimicroblogging, which only takes a couple of minutes at a time. Twitter's 140-character limit per post is an opportunity to compress the infinite moment into one intensified droplet - or to simply pull a single thread from the fabric of experience as it passes through us, unremarkable except for having been caught in words.

 At this moment, it feels just right, and enough, to do that. I like that my tiny haiku blogettes (Thomas and I were talking on Saturday about Twitter as fertile haiku practice) criss-cross with those of the people whose tweets I follow or who are fb friends. I originally started blogging in order to have one place where I could store all the inspiring words and thoughts and images I encounter, and I think I will still use it for that - though I use del.icio.us for some of the same purpose, and have that linked to my Facebook page... 

And: now that I'm at the end of this post - well, I didn't finish it before my phone meeting, the sun set before I had a chance to get back to it, and it took more than a few minutes to write it all down and set all the links. I'm going over to the other playgrounds now - for 5 minutes max! Maybe see you there sometime soon?