Does size matter?

Blogs contain reverse-chronological posts that go up on Web sites in medium to large chunks. Microblogs contain tiny, 140-character reverse-chronological posts that go up mainly on Twitter and Facebook in small bursts.

In the midst of ongoing discussions about the future of journalism, funding for new media projects and citizen journalists, microblogging in particular has experiences exponential growth.

Twitter grew at a rate of 1,382 percent year-over-year, according to a Nielsen Online estimate earlier this year. While that statistic could be inflated by surges in interest and includes thousands of people who turn their backs on the service soon after joining, in 2009 Twitter hit a tipping point as a tool for journalists, a broadcast and interactive medium, and a way to spread ideas far and wide.

As the focus lately has been on hot, young Twitter, it feels like blogs are the older, wiser cousin that gets lost in the back row of the family photo. So much so that tech journalist Paul Boutin cautioned people against starting new blogs in an article for Wired magazine.

But while microblogging has displaced blogging in some ways, I'll use two examples to explain how blogging still can remain relevant (and important) despite the shifting focus of the media and online denizens.

PressThink lies dormant

The first example is the prominent Twitter feed for New York University professor Jay Rosen. Rosen now has 27,000 followers on Twitter, and has posted there more than 9,400 times. He calls it "mindcasting," explaining that he started trying to understand Twitter by making it a part of his work.

Rosen eventually was doing nearly all of his public writing on Twitter and his excellent blog, PressThink, was sitting dormant. His last post on the PressThink blog was on April 12, 2009. When I asked Rosen recently if he had given up on PressThink, here was his response on Twitter (naturally):

"Haven't given it up; I just haven't written anything since then, for PressThink, Huffington Post, or IdeaLab. Teaching tweeting podcasting."

So now his output includes teaching at NYU journalism school, tweeting, and podcasting. In order to follow Rosen's thinking, you can't read a long essay like he used to post on PressThink. You now need to follow his Twitter feed and then read through his posts in one sitting to digest them all. Blogging has been lost in the shuffle, and that's a shame.

Lost in translation

The other example is my own use of Twitter @mediatwit hen I was in the hospital for 9 days, Twitter was my lifeline to the outside world.

I gave daily updates from my hospital bed on Twitter (and received an avalanche of well wishes -- mainly from people I didn't know, which was heartwarming, in a weird way), but never considered posting anything about it on MediaShift.

MediaShift had become much less of a personal space and much more of a professional space for me and for many other writers now contributing to the site. Like so many other blogs covering digital media - GigaOm, PaidContent, ReadWriteWeb - MediaShift was now an online magazine and not just the thoughts on one person and one personality.

Twitter was swallowing up my daily work life and becoming the place for short bursts of prose, quick insights, or links to stories that matter. Every time I got an email pitch from someone about a new Web site, blog or service, I simply tweeted about it rather than write a long story. It was now a news feed that served me stories of interest from other folks -- and also allowed me to share the stories I liked with them. A two-way RSS feed that beat the hell out of other RSS feed readers.

But while I was in the hospital, I got bored and decided to tweet "10 Steps for Saving Newspapers," sending them out one at a time. The response was tremendous, with people re-tweeting and sharing them, and even a few people collecting the tweets onto one URL to share. But why wasn't I the one collecting those tweets onto my own blog?

So I did, creating a post titled "10 Steps for Saving Newspapers." This time, the response was less than stellar, with a lot of criticism of my tiny little steps. Because I was simply reposting what I had written on Twitter, there was little depth to what I had written originally, and not much explanation added.

Microblogging + blogging = success

What these two examples (and many others) lead me to believe is that microblogging and blogging can live together - and really depend on each other. Without Jay Rosen's longer essays and the heft of his blog posts, I feel like I've lost something. And when I depend solely on re-running tweets on a blog post, there's also something missing, a depth of understanding and prose.

Plus, much of what I tweet about includes links to longer blog posts or articles. The tweet acts as a teaser, a headline, a promo for something bigger to come. Yes, it's true that some people have made an art form out of using Twitter as their sole outlet for communication (or one-liner jokes), but for most people, those links to longer thoughts are still vital.

Now I am noticing that my second biggest referrer of traffic to my blog is Twitter and all those URL-shortening services that are used by Twitterers. That means that Twitter has become a vital tool for promoting my blog, and I hear the same thing from other bloggers.

The simple truth is that microblogging is not supplanting blogs completely, even if it feels that way. Instead, microblogging is the place for airing trial balloons, polling a community of followers, getting leads and sources for stories - and then following up with a long blog post. Microblogging is the place to help promote the blog. And the blog is the place where longer thoughts can be fleshed out and discussed in comments. The two can live harmoniously and really depend on each other so that deep (and short) thoughts can flourish.

Mark Glaser is executive editor of "PBS MediaShift" and "PBS Idea Lab." He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the "Online Publishers Association." He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit

Editor: Sean Sinico