📑 ‘Expert Twitter’ Only Goes So Far. Bring Back Blogs

Cal Newport questions the limit of tweets and threads to communicate complex and changing content. He instead calls for a return to blogs to support these conversations.

Twitter was optimized for links and short musings. It’s not well suited for complex discussions or nuanced analyses. As a result, the feeds of these newly emerged pandemic experts are often a messy jumble of re-ups, unrolled threads, and screenshot excerpts of articles. We can do better.

We need to augment social platforms with a surge in capacity of the original Web 2.0 technology that these upstarts so effectively displaced: blogs. We need WordPress-style sites featuring both easy-to-update static pages and chronological posts. These sites could be hosted by institutions with some degree of public trust and a reasonable technology infrastructure, such as universities, medical centers, and think tanks. Some mild gatekeeping could be performed on the experts granted blogs by these institutions, and critically, IT support could be provided so that the experts could start publishing with minimal overhead. If possible, there would be a similar look and feel to these sites hosted at various institutions, providing the sense that they all belong to the same cohesive extended information network.

This touches on something I wrote a few years ago about canonical URLa few years ago about canonical URL, while Chris Aldrich’s recent presentation for the PressEd Conference  provides a useful guide/model.

What is sad and confusing are the people who publish great threads while leaving their WP.com site lying dormant. At the very least, users could copy the unrolled thread and past the content in a space they somewhat manage and have the ability to update?