Twitter 140 Conferene, Mountain View CA
Originally uploaded by JoeDuck
The first major Twitter conference in the world is wrapping up in Mountain View with a panel featuring Jeremy Pepper, DL Byron, Robert Scoble, Stowe Boyd, Moderator: Jason Preston
Scoble just made a great point about how blogging isn’t dead, it’s evolving into the sort of long winded, more academic place for where Twitter is the conversation space.
Hmm – unlike blogs Twitter is an extremely democratic environment because comments are all given the same prominence (though people with more followers will have much greater reach).
Scoble Twitter “encourages normal people”. I like it!
Joe Duck 
Twitter is the conversation space.
That may be both an advantage, and disadvantage. The comments of Twitterers (Twits? :-] ) pop up and are immediately readable, but the layout seems to lend itself to chit-chat (then so do many blogs). Granted, for some online situations, the colloquial-conversation works well–sort of like phone calls. I would, however, dispute the Twitter-exec’s point that blogs have all gone academic. Online-language as a whole–even at the big political blogs like Salon, Slate, KOS, etc–tends to be primarily colloquial and immediate. (Allude to some classic writer or thinker like at KOS–say Kant–and you’d probably be troll-rated, awarded the virtual swazi) For fast texting and so forth Twitter looks fairly bodacious, though I imagine T-speak could get out of hand, or rude and obscene rather quickly.
Horatiox that’s an interesting perspective and I understand what you mean, though in my experience Twitter seems a lot more civil – by far – than blogging venues even where there is heavy moderation. E.g. Tim Ferris is here and said he kills a lot of negative comments because he feels it’s his “kitchen space” and he has that right. I don’t like moderation at all and Twitter avoids basically all moderation except commercial spamming but remains very civil. Not sure why and that could change.
But note I’m not saying Twitter will ever be substantive – I think it will NOT and that is part of why it’ll beat out blogging and perhaps come to rival Facebook as the mass medium of online socializing. We need a standard for online interaction and I hae a hunch Twitter will win that title over the next few years.