I try to make sure that most of my blog posts are at best half of a thought. Some mediums, like Twitter, make it nearly impossible to stuff a well-rounded idea into one discreet item (a Tweet, in that case), by pulling character limits and whatnot.
But social media is inherently a conversational type of media, and it’s harder to have a conversation if every avenue is already explored, every stone unturned, every…well, you get the idea. Nothing that you put online should be a “finished product” in the sense that a print article traditionally is.
It requires a bit of an open mind, but social media can be the ultimate sounding board. It can be extremely rewarding to throw a question out there and see what you get back.
But you will get answers. So don’t ask if you aren’t willing to listen.


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Hugh MacLeod recently asked why he loves his Twitter community more than his community of blog commenters. One response someone offered was that blog comments are often like a Q&A after a speech. I think that ties into what you’re saying — when blog posts are written less like a monologue and more like the opening of a conversation, the tone of the comments is different.
That sounds like a spot-on assessment to me.
I don’t think any piece of writing is every complete. It’s just that at some point you have to give up on it and move on.
Very astute observation here, Jason. Thanks.
One word of caution here. While it’s great to leave open loops to spur discussion, there is such a thing as leaving too much to readers or giving them too little to go on. As a blogger on a newspaper Web site, I’ve found a limit to how much readers looking for news are willing to engage in “open threads.” So I try to keep those to a minimum, and when I do write posts that do little more than ask questions, I try to balance them with surrounding posts that give a lot of answers.