I read Topsy’s BlogWritingCourse blog. She just asked a question which I’ve wondered about. What’s the relationship between blogging and twitter? She concludes that blogging is about networking and Twitter is the ultimate networking tool so they are a nice complement to each other. For me, this raises a lot of questions for me:
- Does any blogging software has a tight Twitter integration so that you can fill in the corresponding tweet and get a tiny url back all inside the blogging software?
- What plugins are there for integration of twitter and blogs? I imagine that there’s an RSS feed gadget so you can see tweets in the sidebar of a blog. There’s probably a lot of ideas here but I’m still a twitter novice so I’m short on ideas.
- Is blogging necessarily about networking? It can be. Or, it can just be self-expression. Does an unread great novel matter?
- I’ve a fair amount of blogging experience but not much with twitter.
- What about the relationship of blogs to facebook? I”ve long wanted to find a really great integration between blogs and a some sort of forum. The relationships that I’ve seen:
- Colocated blogs on a website form a type of community. You can see this on http://www.homeschoolblogger.com and http://www.secularhomeschool.com
- Bloggers who join common-interest networking groups can form communities. For instance, a karate blogger can be part of a group of the Convocation of Martial Artists (now a Ning group, it was recently transformed from a Google group) .
- Bloggers can join general-interest blogging groups such as BlogCatalog and find within them, groups or individuals with common interests. They have a group for our martial arts friends and a group called blogger/blogging for people interested in: Need help or assistance with your blog and blogging? That’s what this group is created for. You can ask for help from the members or give a hand to others.