Short Stuff

You may remember the early days of Blogger. Posts didn’t have titles, and they were often quite short — sometimes just a sentence and maybe a link. And these posts appeared on a person’s own blog, which could be hosted anywhere.

It was well-understood that blogging is provisional, is thinking-out-loud. It was the flow of life-on-the-web. Not everything was an essay.

When Twitter came along we collectively decided that this kind of thing was Twitter’s jurisdiction — that these are just tweets.

But why should we agree that Twitter, or any company, owns an entire form of writing for the web?

That’s why my short stuff appears here (and on my microblog) and then gets copied to Twitter. It belongs on the open web first.

Twitter is just another form of syndication. It’s not the home of my writing.