Blogger, Twitter or Facebook: I've made my choice!

The number of interesting or amusing blogs out there in 'cyberspace' has steadily decreased over the past year or two. I used to particularly enjoy the strangely-named 'Scary Duck', with its eclectic mixture of humour, political comment and satire. Another good read (but with natural history content) was 'The Leicester Llama': again, both informative and entertaining.

Blogs come and go for a variety of reasons: probably the most common is the frustration of sitting down every day and trying to write something that an invisible audience might find worth their time, only to find (from the site stats) that nobody visited!

That isn't a problem for me: this blog is intended as my own diary: somewhere to store the best photos I take on a day out with birding friends. Other people use Flickr for the same purpose. Over the seven years that I've been inflicting my images and occasionally random thoughts on visitors to this blog, the number of people who look at it has risen from around five a day to current highs of over a thousand. There are plenty of blogs out there with much higher visitor numbers, but there are also some that no-one looks at regularly.

I guess the most common reason to cease blogging is when personal circumstances change, meaning the blogger has less time to spend online.

Until yesterday I also posted on Facebook and Twitter. Using the 'friends' system, FB is still, IMHO, a great way to keep in contact with people you know and whose company you enjoy: there are also some fabulous wildlife and photography groups. Generally speaking, I find FB a pleasurable experience that requires very little effort to be part of.

Last October I decided to give Twitter a try, not the least because that's the location to which most of the bloggers whose output I formerly enjoyed seem to have migrated! Straight away I could see both the good and bad aspects of Twitter:

1) The restrictions on the number of characters you can use (now 280 per 'tweet') means you either carry your thoughts over into several posts or, as seems more often the case, you post abbreviated ideas and opinions which may be (are!) misconstrued.
2) You can only post four photos per tweet
3) The use of hashtags means anyone can engage with your tweets and chuck in their twopenny-worth. Often these will be the aggressive, hostile and abusive outpourings of iconoclastic 'eco-warriors'. Who needs that from complete strangers? The same phenomenon drove many people away from the once-great Birdforum: check how infrequently there are postings on the Norfolk pages!
4) Despite frequently tweeting about interesting wildlife I came across, I never received any reciprocal data from my Twitter 'feeds': it was pretty much one-way traffic, with a couple of exceptions: thanks Steve and Rob!

So I've bailed out of Twitter, never to return: from now on, it's this blog and Facebook: I'll leave Twitter to the kid-listers and eco-warriors!