I’m a big user of both Del​.icio​.us, the social book­mark­ing sys­tem (it pow­ers Quak­erQuak­er and the dai­ly posts of links) and Twit­ter, the “micro-blogging” sys­tem that puts mini-messages into Quak­er Ranter (cur­rent­ly with a brown woodsy box­es). They both serve dif­fer­ent pur­pos­es for me and have dif­fer­ent styles. Well, I just real­ized I had writ­ten a Deli​.icio​.us post in a Twit­ter style.

I was book­mark­ing a new post by Dave the “Quak­er Agi­ta­tor,” who’s look­ing for help writ­ing a small grant. I left a minor com­ment and book­marked the post in Del​.icio​.us. I try to do that for most com­ments so that I can go back lat­er and see if any inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion took place in the mean­time. This time though I made an appeal for read­ers direct­ly through the Del​.icio​.us descrip­tion: “The Quak­er Agi­ta­tor is look­ing for help writ­ing a small grant. Any Ranter read­ers able to lend a hand?” I did this know­ing that a few hun­dred sym­pa­thet­ic read­ers will see this tomor­row morn­ing when the links go up. It’s prob­a­bly a moot point as the Quak­er Agi­ta­tor has a much larg­er audi­ence of sym­pa­thet­ic readers.

But styl­is­ti­cal­ly it’s an exam­ple of a cul­ture of a new media form start­ing to change an old­er form. This is a com­mon phe­nom­e­non in this fast-moving Web 2.0 world. Whether my Del​.icio​.us style will adapt or not I don’t know. It’s just an obser­va­tion for now.