Maybe I’ll have ‘What now?‘ carved into my tombstone. It’s an ever-relevant question, and someone might even smile at it if they thought it was the last thing some dead guy wanted to know. Which it would be.

Now, after Doug Belshaw’s post - maybe even partly because of his question, Is Twitter Bad for You? I’ve opened a twitter account. This marks an about-face for me, based on a previous declaration, and a comment I left on another of Doug Belshaw’s posts about the changing face of the edublogosphere a couple of days ago. First, I don’t think Twitter is bad for people. But it might be a major distraction for me - which has been my main point of reluctance.

The interesting thing, and the thing that moved me to set up the Twitter account, was that with the Diigo stampede, Graham Wegner’s post about edublogging and the bigger conversation, this post about filtering Twitter so that it works more like Del.icio.us, and Miguel’s expansive vision for using Diigo to build a multipurpose networking application, I began to give some more serious thought to what seems to be a changing blogscape.

A lot of people have written about this in the last several months. And I have nothing profoundly analytical to add, except to share this post from Bruce Sterling, Beyond Blogs: The Conversation Has Moved Into the Flow that I found today, in Del.icio.us, which finally tipped me off the fence I was riding with Twitter. Sterling was quoting Stowe Boyd:

Basically, conversation is moving from a very static and slow form of conversation — the comments thread on blog posts — to a more dynamic and fast form of conversation: into the flow in Twitter, Friendfeed, and others. I think this directionality may be like a law of the universe: conversation moves to where [it] is most social.

[....]

Twitter and other similar apps are based on the web of flow: information of interest comes to us, not the other way around. And it flows through people, through relationships: it’s not a bunch of clicks on URLs, scrolling, and so on. It’s a move away from hunting and gathering and into relationship agriculture: information grows in our flow applications instead of us spending time hunting it down.

[....]

The way I am getting tugged to blog posts is increasingly as a mention within a conversational bite in Twitter or Friendfeed. I then click out of the flow to see the larger post, and offer my view in the flow — not on the blog — and then I return to the flow, where I will be spending most of my time.

This makes sense: I want to talk about the blog post with the person who brought it to my attention, more so that with some group of strangers at the blog, or even the author, who I may not know at all.

I also don’t think we can expect the fragmentation of the social experience to slow down: it will get a lot worse before it gets better.

So I’ve jumped into the flow. Things change.