been a long time...

so i've obviously been pretty busy lately.  this is my last semester taking classes, and i'm taking 3 while teaching 2 and trying to juggle a few conferences and the requisite paperwork, random school functions and social obligations.  also, the small amount of free time that i do have is more and more often spent hanging around with friends and having weekend get-togethers, hikes, and those sorts of things.  this weekend, for instance, it was a jam session on friday, conference all day saturday, wrapped up by a rico's night last night and then working on presentations for this week all night and day today.  i find there is much less time and desire to blog when i'm increasingly out and about doing, you know, fun real-life stuff.

also, twitter is actually pretty badass and it's easy to get enmeshed in it.  usually the things that have in the past flowered into 1000 word posts on here have started from a sudden idea or two that popped into my head while i was out walking around or grading papers or whatever.  with twitter, i can just hammer out that idea in a sentence, hit send, and not only save time, but also get the idea out to a wider audience (which isn't really my primary goal, but still a draw for sure).  i can easily post links to youtube videos, new music downloads, interesting news stories, etc. there (and in a much easier way that i can on blogger or even tumblr).  and i hear back from 50+ others on a day-to-day basis, in a way that's easier and quicker to read than a whole blog post, and in a way that's easier to access than RSS (twhirl just sits in my sidebar).  so i guess what i'm saying is that mini-blogging has really put how much "unnecessary" time i've spent blogging for years into perspective (i put "unnecessary" in quotes because i'm not entirely convinced it was unnecessary, but i digress) and it's really hard with my current schedule to say to myself "well, i'd really like to comment about how i feel about the current administration's handling of organic foods" and then follow it up with a context-heavy 1000 word post that takes me 30 minutes to write when i could just hammer "new administration's organic food policy problematic? [link]" instead and move on with my life while being reasonably sure that that tweet will get me some feedback and possibly more related links from my peers.

having said that, i could have probably also expressed this entire post as "long-form blogs dying off due to popularity/access/efficiency of twitter?"

but i didn't.  and now there go 10 minutes i'll never get back.