Saturday 5 September 2009

the twitter effect on this blog

Though twitter started in 2006, it became popular only in 2009 as Google trends data reflect.


I signed up for twitter sometime in 2007 but have almost never used it since. However, the nature of my posts on this blog seem to have changed in response to the growing popularity of microblogging. I did a quick data analysis for that too.

My 24 posts in 2008 averaged at 387.583 words per post and I remember taking a longer time to write each post almost never was a post merely a link to another post but conveyed something by itself. However, for the eight months of 2009 I have averaged 214.375 words over 34 posts and includes several posts which are merely links. This becomes even more stark when I consider only the past five months (april through august) where I have averaged 143.930 words over 13 posts and 103.85 words over 7 posts in the past three months.

Since I do not tweet regularly, the reason for this decline cannot have been that this is a behavior I have carried in from twitter where a 140 word restriction curbs any desire to ramble on. Indeed my posts had become small enough to merit such a study. Maybe I should be tweeting my posts. There actually are several things which I might have wanted to convey to the readers of this blog which I do not end up doing due to the unavailability of a comp at the moment it strikes me. There is a huge difference between computer literate and tech savvy and I know where I fit. So rest assured that inertia will keep me on blogger for quite a while.

2 comments:

A ditty said...

My brain cells have been nibbling at my brain in these months of recession and joblessness as to how is it that one "Tweets" on Twitter. However, the million dollar (baby) question which you must answer is the calculation of the elasticity of your response to the phenomenon of microblogging. Note that being the economics question, it is essential to surviving in law school.
Word count - 85
No actually, it is 64.

vikramhegde said...

I've never used twitter from my phone but I'm under the impression that one SMSes their tweet to a number or uses gprs or something. The following should factor into my respose elasticity calculation.
(1) Convenience of posting from a phone and not having to come back
(2) Short and sweet posts. and expectations are for one such.
(3) Losing out on random surfer readership as only people following me will get updates

But the clincher should be (4) Risk of pissing off all people who 'are following me on twitter' with intermittent updates about what I'm doing, what I'm eating, what movie I just watched, how constipation is such a pain etc. I have avoided that behaviour on facebook.

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