There's a blogosphere meme circling around this month that can be described as "do lifestreaming tools such as friendfeed and twitter ruin perfectly good blogger's traffic, authority, ideas?"

Mike Arrington says tech blogger Robert Scoble is an addict who needs an intervention so he'll return to his roots writing perceptive pieces on his blog;--"all that content is just really forgettable, compared to a good thought piece that people refer back to over time. There is no direct way to monetize any of that content, which is something that a full time blogger with a family really needs to think about."

Scoble replies that he;s happy with his time investment, both because of the greater number of followers and the richer conversation and because he's increased his information & news sources.

The always pragmatic Steve Rubel chimes in " As personal branding becomes a weapon in a down economy, look for blogging to make a return run."

Of course what's interesting here is not what an insular circle of high-tech white guys have to say about one another (we get way too much of that already). It's the questions about what place blogging has in a world where the insta-pop corn of twitterstreams and friendfeed communities can be darn near irresistible (like Scoble, I love both friendfeed and twitter.)

I'd side with my new friend Francine Hardaway and say that blogging is incomparable for the following:

• Writing longer, more reflective thought pieces (we're talking over 140 words here as long, people),
• Writing across niche communities to broader and more inclusive audiences
• Sharing personal voice and perspective in a more sustained way
• A means to establish voice and reputation

However, where I think twitter and friendfeed excel over blogging is in building the sociable web in almost real time.  There is no other medium that can give me names of restaurants in Cleveland and chances to meet virtual connections outside of lifestreaming (Facebook, twitter, etc.). The  lazyweb is unparalled  when put to use in the twitter stream, and the loud, messy joy of the twittersphere is infectionous.

But, it ain't blogging. And if you are a writer at heart, you have to blog. My guess is for Scoble, what we've talking here isn't compulsion, but goal-setting.

--After all, if your wish is to be a fundable brand, a one mand band of product,content, output--what you need are hard, targeted numbers--numbers on a scale that lifestreaming totally provides.

No slam on blogging from Robert, just a wish for community--and a way to use engagement, aka community--to justify dollars.

Thanks to everyone who added me on friendfeed. As of this minute, I have 962 followers, would love to hit a thousand, drawing from readers of this blog and my tweets.

If you're reading me and you're interested in what kinds of data I save (much on hyper-local, local, community, CMS, web formats, feminism, sexuality (go figure), FF is very useful because it's easy to see those posts.

Link here. Wouldja, could ja?

So, I'm starting to engage in some very specific shifts in behavior, which I want to talk about, both as a means to better share my thoughts and output, and as a way to kick off some talk about how information sharing and discovery is shifting.  Here's the deal:

1) The best place to see what I am writing/talking/thinking about right now is friendfeed. You need to ask to follow me, but if you're not a bot, a link farmer or a spammer, I will approve you.

Why friendfeed? A couple of reasons:
a) FF is an aggregator. This means that since I am doing alot of clipping and commenting and throwing it into  delicious where I can save the info and get it again later, you can see all that there pretty easily. Since my delicious use means  I am not posting as many interesting links on my blog, if you care FF is the place to go.
b) You can comment on items there that you can't comment on on delicious as easily--in other works, the ff interface supports us having a conversation, which is one of the critical points, right?


2) Twitter is a way to escape the echo chamber and  sample voices/people.

I pruned my twitter stream a day ago. to make room for some new voices. I just went and got a bunch, mostly tied to an area I am going to spend time in over the summer. It was amazing how much I learned about the area--and about some interesting people to follow--by using the twitter location search- good way to suss out digerati in a new place.

3) Blogs are longer form and my  virtual ADD is getting worse (but I still love blogging).
I still love blogging, but so much of what I am doing right now is boiling down to snippets, and ff and twitter are good tools for that.

On the other hand, I could never write this post in either medium.

So, question for you all: How are social media tools shifting your discourse?