blogging

My local newspaper, the Argus Leader, contains an article about Twitter fever finally arriving in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  The start of the article is interesting to read.

Following blogs online takes too much time. So Mike Vetter, 24, uses Twitter to keep up with friends and follow the short posts or "tweets" by people in his business.

"Twitter is called microblogging - small blogs - only up to 140 characters at a time," says Vetter, CEO of DataSync, a Sioux Falls software company. "If I were to follow 50 people blogging, I would be reading all day long. This way I can get the point, boiled down. It's blogging for lazy people."

Isn't that ironic?  When blogging first became popular some of the criticisms bloggers heard was that blogs were too short and not polished enough.  The thought was that blog posts would never hold the same attention by readers compared to real articles and stories written elsewhere.  Now we forward forward to the present and we find that blogs contain too many words which is what spurring the Twitter movement.  The length of a tweet is limited by 140 characters (roughly about the same as a text message in a cell phone).

Following this line of thought, I'm now convinced that by the time my five year old son becomes a teenager he'll call Twitter too inefficient.  Instead his generation and their even shorter attention span will require you to send messages at 7 characters or less.  What would we call this new service, Twit?

After three decades of embracing technology, I think I finally arrived between the old way and the new ways of doing things.  My case in point, I found this article in the print version of my Sunday newspaper.  At the same time, I'm ready to read what you think of the article via my Twitter account.

CMS Wire recent took a look at Technorati's Top 100 blog sites and determined which CMS the sites were using most.  They concluded, not surprisingly, that Wordpress was the most popular CMS with 34% of the top sites using the blogging application.

Simply put, we found that WordPress dominates the list, that Movable Type comes in with a respectable second [16%], and the rest are either custom jobbies or a smattering of other platforms which are, relatively speaking, eating dust.

Probably more interesting, is that full-fledged CMS barely made a dent in the top 100 list.

Wider scope Web CMS technologies are not used much by the top blogs. Drupal scores 5 sites, with Plone used by 1. Other popular Web CMS platforms are conspicuous only by their absence.

CMS Wire isn't saying that CMS are not good for blogging.  I think what CMS Wire is observing is that when users want to only blog...they prefer to keep it simple.  Why use a CMS with more features than they possibly can use when something like Wordpress or Movable Type can do the job?  At least that is what I get from the article.

This Labor Day marks the end of my Summer Technology Break, a self-imposed exile from spending too much time at the computer when instead I could be enjoying family, the great outdoors, and the real world.  How did I do?  Well, the family spent some time in Michigan visiting family, friends, and the fish.  My 4 1/2 year-old son caught his first trout on his first fishing trip (thanks to the patience of Jason and Jean Stephens from Head Hunter Guides).  We also spent a week camping and hiking in the Black Hills of South Dakota which included a family hike up Harney Peak.  For the most part, I would say my break from technology during my hours away from my "day job" was a success.

While I did manage to maintain CMS Report during the summer with a number of posts, I would say my Google PageRank and decrease in advertisement revenue shows that I was indeed on a technology break.  With the break over, I will now be tending to the posts in numbers and consistency with more tender loving care.  I also have some ideas for helping to take CMSReport.com up to the next level.  For better or for worse, you can expect some changes at this site in the months to follow.