Travis Vocino Experiments in Art, Science & Technology.

In creating some new features for my blog I came to a point where I needed to answer a question. Should I Macroblog or Microblog. If you don’t know what that means, that’s most likely because I just made those terms up. The way I see it, there are two trends in blogging, they might already have coined terms describing them but if so I have no idea what they are.

The first is what I call Macroblogging. This is usually a writer’s sport (one who has expertly penned posts) but can also be found on the extreme ranter’s blog. It involves making in-depth posts — more like articles — with references, notes, research, etc. These posts are big and involved, sometimes long-winded but also can be very informative. Macroblogging offers rich content in the form of in-depth articles but usually prevents frequent site updates.

The second, as you might have guessed, would be Microblogging. A good example of this is “mind blogs” where bloggers will make a large volume of very short posts throughout the day about anything and everything they’re thinking. This variety is usually only about 1 or 2 sentences and can even consist only of small sentence fragments. Obviously, Microblogging’s primary appeal is frequent site updates but appropriately lacks in content. Furthermore, you’d have to be more interested in the author to enjoy reading such short thoughts. A random surfer probably doesn’t care about my quick note concerning my lunch today, for example.

In analyzing both of these systems and determining what they offer to my blog, I decided I really want the best of both worlds (don’t we all). However, it’s important to me that the Microblogging doesn’t interfere with the more polished Macroblogging articles. Kottke achieves this by breaking up the loop for his posts on the front page of his site with his “Remaindered” posts. I’ve already implemented a system somewhat like this for my link blog block on the front page of Vocino.com — I may just add another block.

I’m always hearing “You should post more” and I believe Microblogging could be the answer.