Steve Rubel posed some great questions on his blog. He used the analogy of owning a house vs renting in regard to blogging on your own domain or spending time on microblogging sites such as twitter, friendfeed, etc?

His questions are:

Where should we invest our time and sweat equity online? Will people continue to build equity in sites like Twitter that have community today, but most likely will be gone one day? Or should we look for hybrids like Friendfeed where we can take control?

These are easy questions for me to answer!  Blogging & microblogging serve two different purposes for me.

Blogging:

  • an exercise for me to synthesize my thoughts
  • a repository of information for future visitors
  • reflects my journey over the course of time
  • reading other’s blogs provides a high level of learning

Microblogging on the other hand is more here today, gone tomorrow.

  • update on breaking news in the industry
  • an opportunity to get to know people on a personal level
  • exchange of info & ideas – email doesn’t span the group effect
  • keep track of where my friends are at. It’s a bit of a voyeuristic thing but for any reason I can check & see whether they’re traveling, on vacation or what they’re doing.

So I see value in investing in both. The majority of my social interactions are online & I’ve gotten to know people quite well thru Twitter. It is well worth my time. But I also need to be blogging. Investing in both is valuable for me & each offers unique paybacks.