microblogging also micro-blogging

putting short updates such as brief texts, photos etc on a personal blog, especially by using a mobile phone or instant messaging software

the appeal of microblogging is its immediacy and portability, with updates which can be sent or received in a variety of ways including on mobile, handheld devices

What I'm planning for dinner tonight … a traffic queue on the motorway … the score at the end of the first half … a picture of my new dining table … In today's 'always-on', wireless society, no thought, fact or comment is too trivial to be digitized. Welcome to the world of microblogging.

Microblogging is in essence the same as blogging – creating and maintaining an online journal – but updates, sometimes described as microposts, are characteristically shorter, usually between 140 and 200 characters long. Microposts can be made public on a website or distributed to a specific group of subscribers, who can read them online, via instant messaging, or even on their mobile phone as a text message. The appeal of microblogging is therefore its immediacy and portability, with updates which can be sent or received in a variety of ways including on mobile, handheld devices. Though most microblogging involves text, usually brief statements of one or two sentences, some microblogging services allow video and audio posts. Following the pattern of blogging, the word microblogging has the related forms microblogger, referring to a user, and microblog, which can be used either as a verb or a noun describing the journal entry itself.

As well as the popular social networking function of microblogging, a number of other significant applications are emerging, such as real-time news updates on sport, weather, traffic problems, etc. Flagship media organisations such as the BBC have now begun to make headlines available in the form of microblogs.

Although social networking services like Facebook and MySpace have their own microblogging feature, the most popular and well-known microblogging service is Twitter, within which microblogs/microposts are sometimes referred to as tweets (and microbloggers as tweeters). Tweets must be less than 140 characters in length. In 2008, then presidential candidate Barack Obama famously used Twitter when he microblogged from the campaign trail. Other popular microbloggers in the public eye include British actor and TV personality Stephen Fry.

Background of microblogging

Microblogging and its related forms derive of course from a combination of the word blog (meaning online journal, the popular contraction of weblog) and the prefix micro-, defined in the Macmillan Online Dictionary as 'extremely small'.

Since its first appearance in the late nineties, blog has embedded itself in popular usage, partly because its simplicity lends itself to participation in just about any process of word formation. Among the many examples are: derivation into noun blogger, conversion into intransitive verb blog, compounding/affixation to give audioblog and microblog, and the formation of popular blends such as phlog (photo and blog) and moblog (mobile and blog).

by Kerry Maxwell, author of Brave New Words

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