SmoothSpan Blog

Stowe Boyd’s blog lately has become a stream of Twits, er Tweets, or whatever the heck they’re called:

jkatt @stoweboyd See OpenACircle at W2X 10:30am Tue: Facebook + WebEx + Skype + free + killer video = Collabotool for the rest of us. Coming?

BJ @stoweboyd SuggestionBox.com – feedback management platform meets community collaboration with a business model 😉

kwatson49 @stoweboyd Elastra enables companies to launch clustered database applications on-demand (i.e. Amazon Web Services).

That’s the 3 most recent “blog posts” from Stowe, and each one shows up with a banner ad bigger than the post in Google Reader.  I guess this is the new new thing and all, but it’s annoying.  Sorry Stowe, but I’m used to your much more interesting and richer “normal” blog posts.  I hope this isn’t the wave of the future, LOL!

Seriously though, this is an example of learning style dissonance.  I felt the same when Scoble suddenly started dumping tons of video and quit doing real blogging for a period.  Oddly enough it was around the same time that I became aware of the love-hate reactions I was seeing towards Twitter.

These observations led me to pen my theories about Learning Styles and the Web.  This is therefore a good time to recap the theory, which is best expressed as a Myers-Briggs style diagram on the web:

The idea behind this is that different people have affinities for different squares, just as the learning styles from Myers-Briggs help us to understand how people like to communicate in social situations.  In this case, a Twitter lover is an Interrupt-Text-Structured-Participator.  A Blog reader is more of a Deferred-Text-Structured-Watcher.  A single person may enjoy both styles or they may not.  But it is jarring to present one style in a context where another is expected.

Lest you think I insist on one style, I think it’s valuable for people and businesses to experiment with offering content in all the boxes and letting their readers self-select what they may like.  Play with it a bit.  You may like the results.  Just be careful not to cut off the channel and style your loyal readers have come to prefer you for.  The idea is to provide “additional” to expand your reach, not “instead of”.

Towards that end following me on Twitter will keep you posted automatically when this blog updates.

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Sarah Perez loved these “TwitPitches” and there was a method to Stowe’s madness.  I suppose it was a way to popularize the notion, but I’m glad they stopped coming and hope no other Twitter feed appears in one of my blog streams. 

Maybe this is the next step of bad news: less seed capital, good news:  shorter pitches.  Enter your TwitPitch here and you may actually get $29.95 in seed money in exchange for 30% of your company.