Perusing through recent blog articles in my feed reader, I spy many articles about Twitter–but few about Twitter.
Like leaves on an autumn day, these blog posts appear to talk about the same thing at quick glance, but they’re quite different.
Confused yet? Peer with me into the brains of other bloggers.
Julie Roads (@writingroads) compares Twitter to a golf course but opts not to define either side of the analogy. Rather, she writes:
There we all are hanging out and enjoying ourselves–we all know what we do for a living, we all know we’d love to do business together or learn from each other–but it’s secondary, it’s unspoken. And still the business gets done. Oh, and we’re spared the horrible clothes.
She’s writing about how Twitter can be adapted into layman’s terms but she’s not writing about the social networking site.
From the framework of public relations which he knows best, Todd Defren (@tdefren) also writes about Twitter and how everyone watches your tweets:
It is perfectly human to kvetch about how tired or unmotivated or hung-over you are to your friends and even the clutch of co-workers in your immediate vicinity. But do it on Twitter, and you’re casting your fate to the winds.
Note how Todd explains a way he views the microblog, but he’s not writing about Twitter, either.
Reading other bloggers and their subject matter–Jason Baer (@jaybaer) and the art of live tweeting, Andy Beal (@andybeal) and how one tweet cost someone her job, Geoff Livingston (@geoffliving) and the starkness between Twitter and Facebook–it should be painstakingly obvious that folks are blogging about Twitter without blogging about Twitter.
When Mitch Joel (@mitchjoel) and Dave Fleet (@davefleet) went back and forth on the intersection of tweets and insults, you can see how they blogged about Twitter without really blogging about it.
It’s no different with Kim Woodbridge (@kwbridge) blogging about a Twitter tool to track cursing, Laurel Papworth (@silkcharm) blogging about Twitter management, or Danny Brown (@dannybrown) blogging about twittering for charity.
You may recall I abstained from blogging about Twitter last month.
I spent the month blogging about the importance of Yelp and TripAdvisor to small businesses, my reluctance to buy a Kindle, the necessity of WiFi, and a glance at 127 countries reading my blog.
Now that March has come and thinly disappears, my archive indicates I’ve only blogged about Twitter a few times since. I learned a valuable lesson last month that I see echoed in my fellow bloggers:
It is very easy to write about something without writing about the thing at all.
Photo credit: bweisner
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