Has Twitter killed blogging?

Kottke mentioned a theory that I’ve heard a bunch. New media killing old media (again).

Since I’ve kept all of my tweets and blog posts and everything else on my own server going back to 1999, I thought it would be simple enough to throw some anecdotal information at the question.

Here’s a graph of number of blog posts (blue) versus tweets (green) that I’ve written over the last 13 years.

So, while it seems like blog posts haven’t really suffered much as a direct result of the growth of Twitter, it could be that I would’ve written more blog posts if I didn’t have a plethora of other lower barrier ways of self expression.

In fact, that probably applies to the general evolution of publishing in general. Just because a particular line of lizards evolved into birds doesn’t mean lizards are going to go extinct. And also doesn’t mean that whales will never evolve in the future.

There’s more life and more variety all around, and plenty of room for everyone to thrive.