Should I blog or should I microblog? ¿Porque no los dos? Pterotype

Should I blog or should I microblog? ¿Porque no los dos? Pterotype

I've seen many people approach the question of "what platform should I use" as if there was only one answer. There is not.

And that is both for G+ users as a whole and for you personally. There's no need to be locked into a single message delivery and receipt system, which is what most media platforms boil down to. And best, you can interconnect between systems, playing off their strengths.

In the ancient times of August, 2015, I did a little exploration of where interesting content might be, by searching for a list of "global thinkers" compiled by Foreign Policy magazine, across about 100 sites, including social media, traditional media, alt media, and numerous other classifications.[1]

There were some expected findings (Facebook is ginormous) and surprises (Google+ really isn't that intellectual, as measured by that metric).

Two of the biggest surprises were that tiny little itty bitty Metafilter (about 1/1,000th the size of Facebook) has astonishingly high content quality, and Wordpress, King of the Blogs, did impressively well with a huge catalogue of material with impressive relevance.

The problem with blogs is that they are hard to find, reach, discover, and interact with. The advantage of blogs is that you can organise, arrange, format, tag, and structure what you write. Which is why they're so popular. (Wordpress actually powers a whole slew of other sites, one of the reasons the platform is as big as it is.)

The problem with big, meaty, juicy text (what are you looking at me like that for) is that it is hard to get in front of people). It's the light an airy stuff that travels well. If you want to advert people's attention, you want an adverting medium: one that lets short little ... birdsongs ... of text float across the stream.

Or Mastodon toots.

Twitter and other microblogs are essentially an advertising medium. Not in the sense of "pay to promote", but in the sense of "making others aware of some more significant message". And like all tools, this can be used for good or bad.

My future goal is to tie both blogging and microblogging together, and I'm looking at a set of tools for that. The tool here isn't one I'm contemplating, but the basic principle is the same.


Pterotype makes your Wordpress blog appear to be a Mastodon instance to Mastodon users. They can follow you, see your posts, and reply to them.

Pterotype makes Mastodon engagement appear as Wordpress comments to the blog owner. Responses are synchronised back to the blog and appear there.

That is, each group can access and engage with content from their preferred platform. It's a best-of-both-worlds scenario.

And I'd like to suggest that the model is the future of online engagement, one that busts us out of old silos.


Stop thinking of single platforms. Start thinking of open networks, and of making it blindingly simple to interact with these.

This isn't a new thing. Postal mail, books, phone calls, video, and any number of other information media come from and go to all kinds of devices, formats, organisations, and tools. There's some porting and patching involved in some cases, the end user and producer are often unaware of much of this. There's little reason our online experience cannot be similar.

That's my hope and dream here.

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Notes:

1. Tracking the Conversation: FP Global 100 Thinkers on the Web https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/tracking_the_conversation_fp_global_100_thinkers/


https://jeremydormitzer.com/blog/announcing-pterotype/
https://jeremydormitzer.com/blog/announcing-pterotype/