I have the hardest time coming up with ideas for blogs lately. I blame Twitter.
Once upon a time, my brain was swirling with blog topics, and I banged out several a week. Now, I find that most of my ideas fit into 140 characters or less, especially if I use some creative abbreviations. It's a lot of fun to tweet, but it's sapping my strength for writing longer blogs.
Obviously, I don't consider myself a "blogging star," but my headline at the top of this page is a reference to The Buggles' tune from almost 30 years ago. I'm sure a few years ago many reporters felt like blogging killed the feature story. And before that, online journalism killed the idea of holding a story until the next morning's paper.
Coping with Twitter -- and how it pulls traffic way from our bread and butter that is the mighty page impression -- is a challenge that has baffled most publications, especially ones that are online only, like OnMilwaukee.com. Tweeting does not make us any money, though indirectly, it can help build legitimacy and drive readership in the long run.
That's all well and good, but if we've lost our will to blog, that's bad.
Or is it?
Another reason I've scaled back my writing is because I'm overseeing a major site redesign right now, which will launch very soon. In this latest version of OnMilwaukee.com, we are taking Twitter very seriously, and maybe, just maybe, we have figured out a way to make this amazing invention work for us in the short-term, too.
We will launch a section tentatively called OnMilwaukee.com Live, which is a up-to-the-second look into everything on OnMilwaukee.com. This new widget uses Twitter technology to create a visual tag cloud of sorts, and it mixes live staff tweets with all the dynamic content on OnMilwaukee.com every day. It's a little hard to explain without seeing it in action, but we're very excited to unveil it -- and, to the best of our knowledge, no one is doing anything like it, anywhere.
Until then, I'll resist the temptation to tweet all of my best material and I'll save a little something for longer reads. But if you do want to follow me on Twitter, I encourage you to. I'm @AndyTarnoff, and I do my best to avoid the tweets like, "I'm eating a popsicle" and keep you entertained and informed as best as possible -- in 140 characters or less.
Andy is the president, publisher and founder of OnMilwaukee. He returned to Milwaukee in 1996 after living on the East Coast for nine years, where he wrote for The Dallas Morning News Washington Bureau and worked in the White House Office of Communications. He was also Associate Editor of The GW Hatchet, his college newspaper at The George Washington University.
Before launching OnMilwaukee.com in 1998 at age 23, he worked in public relations for two Milwaukee firms, most of the time daydreaming about starting his own publication.
Hobbies include running when he finds the time, fixing the rust on his '75 MGB, mowing the lawn at his cottage in the Northwoods, and making an annual pilgrimage to Phoenix for Brewers Spring Training.
