Has NanoBlogging gone too far?
May 4, 2009 by
Adam
Filed under
Blogging, Entrepreneurship, Internet
MicroBlogging brought us Twitter, and the phenomenon is sweeping the internet like a tornado. Everybody is using Twitter for socialising, making money, generating leads, finding clients, networking, joint ventures – you name it.
Twitter allows us – in very few words, to give brief updates on our status, what we’re doing, and share short, sharp pieces of information with our likeminded followers.
Just when you think things can’t get anymore brief than a Tweet, NanoBlogging is now on the scene. But is this just a flash in the pan attempt at coming up with a new and inventive way of saying as little as possible?
Sites like Adocu are taking NanoBlogging to the extreme with their one word updates. The potential flaw with NanoBlogging is that there is no human element, and not really very much opportunity for promoting a link, product or service in a single word… So I join and I want to write a Nano – and I am greeted with:
“Remember: only letters, numbers and links. But you can end it with any 3 characters.”
So I go and check out the feed, and here is what I found: @home, potato, sillyname, thinking – and oh yeah, betterthantwitter.
Betterthantwitter – I don’t think so. So anyway, getting in the spirit of things – what would you NanoBlog if you only had one word?
Me? Entrepreneur of course!
Adam Toren
Wow, now we have nano blogging? Didn’t think we could get any shorter than twitter.
That is just silly…
My 25 year old son, who’s quite hip, but also loves to work with his hands and be outdoors told me that this is all getting ridiculous. He’s all but canceled his Facebook account. He says we should all get off the computer and start talking in person again. Hmm….
…reminds me of when he and his brother were little and we wouldn’t let them watch tv or play video games. We told them to “GO OUTSIDE AND PLAY!”
Pretty interesting indeed. Doubt I’d be much interested, but then I find it hard to believe how Twitter has caught on. I have a Twitter account, seldom ever open it … every day I get notices that people are following me … guess for one thing, if I never post I can never say the wrong thing … but why would people follow someone who never even opens his account? Weird. For years I was a big Yahoo messenger chatter, then I gave it up mainly because of the tremendous waste of time.
Many on this blog are too young to remember the online world before the Internet … I was big on BBS systems, had a lot of friends all over the world exchanging messages, one dial up at a time. A friend of mine and I used to compete n figuring out the shortest message we could send and still say something understandable at the other end … I guess we were “nanobloggers” long before our time.
Back in the 1870’s when commercial telegraphy … dots and dashes … first went world-wide, telegraphers had their own ‘chat groups’ sending specially coded messages intermixed with the commercial telegrams they were being paid to tap out. Maybe they were ‘nanobloggers’ too.
I really see a lot of things today that people ‘rediscover’, but are really things that were around before many of the blogging crowd today were even born … there’s something to that old “nothing new under the sun” saying.
Wow… That is ridiculous. The 140 character model used my twitter is genius but anything less than that become obnoxious. Nanoblogging doesn’t facilitate conversation.
Also, Twitter helps develop writing skills by forcing people to stay focused and concise. Nana blogging on the other-hand will be the death of language as we know it.
Indeed, with twitter we have come to the point, where in nano seconds you can inform your friends or customers about some news or any other information. Really amazing revolution.. What will be next …
Great post and point by C.A. Simmons! Twitter is about exchanging information and personal interaction. I’m all for innovative technologies and ideas, however living in a virtual world, and as an entrepreneur, I gravitate toward communication tools that will both benefit my community and connect me with them.
I gotta say, I can see the humor in 1 word updates though (If anyone could appreciate or follow and appreciate my train of thought that way is yet to be seen):
Silly
Coffee
Somersault
smile
…
Marney
I agree that it’s all getting way too ridiculous, especially with teens. When I was in high school (im only 26 now, so it wasn’t even that long ago) we didn’t all have cell phones and internet. Now, it seems like kids play World of Warcraft while IN SCHOOL along with msn chat, etc. I mean, we had internet in the school libraries but every site was blocked unless it was education-related. If that’s not bad enough these teens are constantly texting, and their texting habits turned into their everyday email language. As the owner of a merely all-teen girls blog, I love all my readers (of course) but the text-talk is too much sometimes! I really fear that in a few years from now our dictionary will change entirely to support this texting talk. Twitter and micro blogs are definitely something people need to use this shorthand form of nonsense writing since you’re limited at how much you can write, and they are essentially just like texting (only to the world, not just one person.) Not only the short hand that drives me nuts but how many spelling errors are made ON PURPOSE. And what’s with all the extra letters now in some words? Likke how some people wrrite like thiis. I get that a lot too. Or should I say, “allot”