Facebook vs. blogs

It's not too different from the what the slow bloggers were saying a few weeks back in the NYT, but I find I am checking into Facebook more, and posting random updates about myself there, instead of composing reflective, deathless, prose to post on the blog. I even posted a recipe on Facebook yesterday to a friend who messaged me asking for it ... and, since it's a recipe I only had access to because I subscribe to both a magazine (Cook's Illustrated) and their subscription web site, I felt better about sharing it in a private message between me and a friend, than "publishing" on my blog. But as a writer of what is supposed to be a food-related blog, this still does strike me as a change.

A few years ago (must've been 2004) at a librarians' conference in a presentation on technology trends, one of the commentators, Karen Schneider, said that she thought blogging had come along just in time to save most people from how complex good HTML (and XHTML) was getting - you could do cooler and cooler things with your web site, but the learning curve was getting steeper - so blogging gave people a way to communicate, replacing publishing a home page. Now I think maybe it's blogging that's getting too hard, and people are using Facebook (and twitter, and text message, and, and, [your favorite technology here] instead. I had an example of this earlier this month - I posted a link to an MP3 on Facebook, and I got this nice linked player:

I don't know how to do that on my 'blog, and only kind of in html ....



Oh, and speaking of communicating, I spent some time Wednesday composing one of those "25 things about me" notes that are around on Facebook now, and the 26th thing that I couldn't fit into my note is I wish I could actually be friends with Robyn Hitchcock, like he was someone I could go for coffee with, or email, or just hang out with in another way than queuing up to be an admiring fan at the end of a show ... I used to say I'd settle to be on his Christmas letter list, 'cuz his stories are so good.