Some lament twitter as the death of blogging. For me it has been a stimulus to change which blogs I read when. Rather than obsessively checking my feed reader I have found myself plenty busy just reading the many posts to which the folks I follow link. Where the blogrolls of my favorite blogs are comparatively static and overwhelmingly long, the flow of post recommendations seems much more organic and manageable. I almost never feel guilty or "behind" because of a twitter post announcement, whereas I often felt like I'd missed something if I didn't get back to my favorite blog pre-twitter.
I'm sure there's a wide variety of experience on this one, but the generalization I'd make is not that twitter is the end of blogging, but that it's a new, and possibly improved, blog referring and announcing system.
Of course that description has its own troubles, best summed up, perhaps, in Chris Lott's recent statement, "The platform pales in comparison to the People...". I don't check out posts because the recommendation comes from twitter, but because it comes from someone I'm following on twitter. I think that's a non-trivial difference.
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Chris L wrote
I agree that Twitter is a great referral system. The links that are shared are a primary attractor for me! But it doesn't replace my regular blog reading with the reader (for one thing, I'd be irritated if all those people posted "new blog post" announcements on Twitter, which I have pretty much stopped doing but may resume in the future), it supplements and partially overlaps it.
beau wrote
Supplements and partially overlaps, exactly.
But it isn't just the "Look at my post" referrals, it's the "I'm reading this groovy post" tweets that add so much.