Back in January I wrote about the Lazysphere and it's impact on blogging. My point then was that many tech bloggers have become lazy in simply re-blogging links rather than breaking news or writing essays that outline powerful new ideas or big questions. Now there are signs that the same is spreading to Twitter.
As of this writing, approximately two percent of tweets - or a staggering 34,000 Twitter postings per day - are simply re-shared content. I calculated the figure by tracking the number of mentions per day for either RT or retweet using Twist. Then, I compared the data to the daily volume statistics on TweetRush. Below are two charts from the last seven days. Using Thursday as a moment in time, 1.9% of the 1.8M tweets used either the word retweet or RT (approximately 34,500).
My frustrations with the Lazysphere led me to set up a special "Thinkers" folder in Google Reader that I treat like a mutual fund. I love this feed because it's a fountain of new ideas and debate. It's like visiting Ben Franklin's Junto. And it reminds me about what attracted me to first reading blogs in 2003.
Twitter is different that blogging, of course. It's not a Junto. It's more like visiting a party and eavesdropping on conversations between friends. However, if the two percent of the volume overall is re-tweeting it's conceivable that it might be higher within your network.
In my case it is and it's why - for as much as I enjoy Twitter - I take Leo's approach and treat it like a swimming pool where I take the occasional dip. I get far more value out of my RSS reader than I do from Twitter but nothing beats it for getting answers to questions. So each medium fills a role in my information diet. But I wonder overtime what impact re-tweeting or lazy blogging might have on the conversation overall
