What Happens To Blogging When Twitter Goes Down

What Happens To Blogging When Twitter Goes Down

by Alex Wilhelm

Twitter pulled a Twitter today and went down, as you well know, and thus took the blogging world crashing along with it. It is no small secret that in regards to online content dissemination (which is not a dirty word, I promise), Twitter is quickly becoming the de facto solution.

Not that RSS, Facebook, and the like do not share some part in any publication’s overall strategy for the promotion of recent posts, but the most pugnaciously powerful percolator is quickly becoming Twitter, most especially in the technology world. If you already knew this, you are probably in the writing game.

There is an interesting distinction, however, that needs to be drawn between websites that are largely of the blog format, and those that are largely not. Of course, there is an enormous gray area, the HuffingtonPost for example living in it, but the dichotomy is accurate enough here for our larger point. If your publication covers a specific niche, and quickly follows a breaking new cycle, Twitter is the only tool to quickly amass readers to a story that has literally just been born. That and the carrier pigeon, if you must.

The difference, returning to our largely non-blog publication, is that their audience is slightly less episodic, and in terms of the news cycle, constantly behind in the editorial aspect of their work. The websites of newspapers, and to a higher degree their print publications, fit this mold well. Their audience is loyal to a specific brand of news (the WSJ, the NYTimes, and so forth), and do not mind even a 12 hour lag from occurrence to story for their reading. This sort of publication has a stock audience that will read a certain number of articles a week regardless of their content. They are not looking to read something specific; they want to read the ‘news,’ and thus have but a small drive to go and find it themselves.

And so for the publications that are more blog-esque (this is most of the websites you read, I assume), traffic is episodic and occurrence based, and therefore lean heavily on an announcement medium that is single-action oriented, and contains the ability to expand via sharing (the vulgar ‘viral’ expansion), and reach a large enough group of people to make the time gain (between the fast story happening now, and the slower story the next day from the non-blog) to the reader worth the extra effort of going out and reading the story now, as opposed to having it spoon fed to them the next day by the USA Today, or what have you.

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