My Life In 140 Characters

Why would anyone launch a blog if they’re already writing a monthly column in a print magazine or could tell their story immediately in 140 characters or less on Twitter?  What stories are worthy of or require more than 140 characters but need the immediacy and “artistic” control of a blog?  These are just some of the questions I’ve been asking myself since I launched, and for the many months spent planning, this blog.  I’ve been asking myself a lot of other questions this past week, but we’ll go into those another time. 

Being the methodologically and analytically rigorous nerd that I am, I thought I should develop criteria for those topics/stories/thoughts/sugggestions/etc. that I should tweet versus those on which I should post, or even by topic which situational factors would lead me in one direction or the other.  You know, along comes a topic, phrase or whatever strolling through your brain, when it comes to the Twitter/blog fork among those synapses, and I’d like to put up one of those terrific signposts that you find on remote Caribbean islands that have every city from which anyone passing by has ever come. 

Having noodled on this for a while, I decided that I would make much better progress if I developed some specific use cases from which to extrapolate a decision matrix or algorithm.  Well, you can imagine where that led me!  So I decided to just grab a random item from my email attachments download area, which is where I store everything that doesn’t fit into my meticulous hierarchy of email mailboxes and similarly well-organized collection of directories in which I store everything that’s not email. 

Enter Group Captain Speaking in his Christmas outfit.   I first met Group Captain Speaking of the New Zealand Air Force when Ron and I were staying at the home of one of his NASA colleagues, who served in Speaking’s command.  Those Kiwis are a wild bunch, with lots of Maori traditions intertwined with the clearly Anglo ones, but there was something about Group Captain Speaking that was oddly familiar, as those we had met in another time and place.  Clearly this was going to make one hell of a use case for my blog versus twitter navigational decision framework.

The bottom line.  It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.