Online video & social media technology

vrijdag 8 april 2011

Blogging v.s. Microblogging

I’ve started microblogging one year ago (Twitter) and now I have a little experience with normal blogging. In this post I want to write something about my experiences.

Fast
Blogging through Twitter is faster for me then normal blogging because of the 140 characters limit. So that makes it easier to follow a lot of people but it also means that people post a lot of crap en you have to look for the interesting messages.

Personal
I guess when I choose to make a normal blog post I want it to be more personal. So I would use it for example to tell my friends and family about my experiences as an exchange student. I don’t want to do that through Twitter too much because the most of my followers are not interested in my personal life. So I use Twitter to talk about English football for example, or snowboarding. Just things were me and some of my followers have a common interest in.

Business
The head of the company where I did my internship did a lot of blogging and posting comments on blogs. For him it was a marketing method. It’s a good way to show your name on the internet, especially when you do it in blogs about the fields you are working. And other people see your opinion so you can connect with each other and maybe make some changes in the field you are working. So company’s can also use it to keep up with what’s going on, or they just read what their customers say about them on internet.
I think the same things are possible with microblogging, the difference is that the messages are shorter so there is not too much space for explanation.

Me, myself and I
I personally like the microblogging more because it’s only short messages, you don’t have to think as much about a post as you have to do on a normal blog. And I think it’s easier on Twitter to create a circle of “friends” because there are a lot of open discussions going on. Maybe it’s just me but I don’t see that so much on normal blogs. Of course there are great discussions too, but it’s most of the time just between a few people.

Second Life

I was not able to play second life because it kept crashing..

But I did some thinking about it. I like to talk to other people on the internet but I don’t think Second Life is the right way for me. The 3D buildings look cool but I don’t see the advantage of it (when you just want to talk about something).
And I read on Wikipedia that it calls itself a game but it’s not a real game because it doesn’t have a real purpose. So that’s the second point, why should you play a “game” that doesn’t have a real purpose?

The only real use I see is a marketing purpose, but that counts more for company’s then for the users I guess. And that only works as long as there are users on Second Life. It’s interesting that some people become rich in real life by investments in virtual money. In 2009 there were around 64.000 Second Life accounts that hat financial advantage from the game. Most of the time it’s just about a little money but it’s still interesting.

I don’t know how much time they spent to make money on Second Life but I think I rather invest my time in working or studying then playing a “game” that has no purpose and when I want to talk about something I rather use the good old message boards.
But when I should decide to go into a virtual world, I would choose Second Life (if it works) because I think there are still the most people.