I’m liking the developing trend I see towards silicon valley digerati reconsidering blogging, after a year spent focused on microblogging with Twitter. See Buchheit’s blog, v2 post.

I’ll admit I’ve been looking for some momentum to start the beaknikblog again. It’s been far too long. Also, the one-liner response format Twitter allows leaves me wanting at times.

But, sigh, I enjoy posting random thoughts to Twitter without thorough reasoning!

A conundrum. The microblog format has fewer (perceived) real-life consequences and that allows for richer freedom of expression. I don’t care as much about my misspellings or stupidity on Twitter.

Unfortunately, the drive for expression seems to stop there: I’ve transmitted random thoughts to the friends I care most about receiving them, with a minimum of effort.

There’s definitely value in a well-written blog post — translating a brain fart into a full blown entity that can be referenced, seriously commented on, or followed up after further investigation. But I don’t do it anymore. Microblogging has placated the part of me that seeks to advertise my ideas.

One solution could be to introduce a form of light peer-review to blog posts. A small set of people I trust could see what I write and if enough of them give the thumbs up to a given post, it gets published. Then there can be some reinforcement that I’m not making a fool of myself with a poorly researched or risky post.

Or maybe we revisit the idea of merging blogs and microblogs, using some Slashdot-like filter. Going to my “homepage” would present a stream of everything I’ve put online, but filtering out things that haven’t received at least a +1 rating from someone else. (If someone is a close friend, or they want to stalk me online, they just remove the filter.) This could be pretty simply implemented by changing the RSS URL. For instance if my insane drivel is getting on your nerves, but you like reading my project updates, include a filter=4 field in the RSS query string.

Or, simplest of all, we all try to cultivate the habit of responding to Twitter posts we find interesting with “Blog it!”