Here are a couple of interesting statistics: the current version of this blog was launched on April12, 2006 — which means it’s almost exactly two years old. During that time, I’ve posted 404 blog entries, not counting this one.

Meanwhile, I began using the Twitter “micro-blogging” site sometime in October, 2007 — which means I’ve been twittering for approximately six months. During that time, I’ve posted 2,277 “tweets.”

Thus, while I’ve been writing “formal” blog postings for approximately four times longer than I’ve been twittering, I’ve published roughly 5.5 times fewer blogs than tweets. Or to put it another way, my frequency of twittering is approximately 22 times greater than my frequency of blogging.

I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing; and I’ll be the first to admit that some of my twitter messages will have absolutely no impact on the human race. When I get up in the morning, I’ll often type the message “Good morning, Twitterverse!” into my Twitter reader (depending my mood, I use either Twhirl or Twitterific or Snitter). And when I wrap up my work,often late in the evening, I’m prone to type a message that says something like “Done for the day, going to sleep. Back tomorrow. Twitter on, dudes!” I don’t bother telling the 240 people who “follow” my Twitter messages every time I sneeze, or have a cup of coffee, but a certain percentage of my tweets are nothing more than “noise” — harmless and relatively non-intrusive noise, to be sure, and possibly of interest to a few friends and colleagues — but not something that needs to be archived on the Internet for eternity.

But even if half of my Twitter messages were as banal as the examples above — which I really don’t think is the case — that would still mean that I’m twittering 10 times more frequently than blogging. Again, that’s not necessarily good or bad; but it’s definitely different. And while my behavior might possibly be unique in this respect, my hunch is that you’ll find a similar disparity between twittering and blogging among other Internet users.

In my case, there’s a very simple explanation: Twitter messages are, of necessity, short; they’re restricted to 140 characters or less. So they tend to be one or two sentences long, and they can be written quickly. Sometimes it’s a brief answer to a question that some other Twitterer has raised; sometimes it’s a brief question of my own. Sometimes it’s a URL link to a news article that I think my Twitter followers would find relevant and newsworthy; sometimes it’s a hilarious YouTube video that someone has just sent me …

By contrast, blogging is a time-consuming activity. This will be a relatively short blog posting (by my standards), but it’s already seven paragraphs long. It has taken half an hour to compose, though that’s partly because I’ve been distracted while writing it, and have looked at a couple of websites and responded to a couple of emails. Generally, though, I have to block out a full hour to write a typical blog posting; and while the resulting material is likely to be more substantive than “Good morning, Twitterverse!”, the reality is that it’s really tough to find an hour in my schedule, day after day after day…

Some bloggers, of course, do manage to write very short blog postings; those are the folks who somehow manage to post 5-10 blog entries per day, every day. If it works for them, and for their readers, that’s fine too. But it seems like a lot of overhead (in terms of wasted space on a browser screen, not to mention old-fashioned things like CPU cycles and bandwidth, which we’re not supposed to care about any more) to have an entire blog page within nothing but a sentence or two of “content.”

In my case, I think I’ll continue taking advantage of both blogging and micro-blogging (i.e., Twittering). Blogging is great for writing a page or two of reasonably serious commentary on some topic of interest; and Twittering is great for brief, rapid-fire commentary. It’s also interesting that Twitter creates a much stronger sense of an active “community”: if I ask a question, tell a joke, or recommend an interesting Web site via Twitter, I’m likely to get a response from people within a matter of seconds. By contrast, if I write a thought-provoking blog posting, I may not see any comments attached to that entry until a day or two later — by which time I’ve often forgotten the whole subject, and have moved on to something else.

Blogs have been around a lot longer than Twitter, so it’s probably way too early to be making these comparisons and distinctions. Check back here in six months or a year, and perhaps I’ll have some additional epiphanies to share with you on the subject. Meanwhile, this blog posting has now consumed 50 minutes and 10 paragraphs of material. Enough!