While RSS still plays a very important role for practically all online publications to get their news out to subscribers, and Google plays a critical role for the stories to get picked up by casual visitors, Twitter is playing a middleman role and growing in the minds of many publishers, who see the microblogging service as a significant traffic driver. Now, instead of using the catchy headlines we once saw in print, or keyword-laden headlines that make Google giddy, we're now seeing headlines truncated to less than 140 characters, or even as low as 125 characters as the standard, assuming a short URL follows.For me, practically the only driver for the length of a headline is whether it easily fits in one deck for somebody using standard fonts in a browser. I don't tend to think about SEO benefits down the road and don't consider if the headline will "play well" on Twitter or other social networks, but do recognize that a good headline can be "make or break" for those seeing the story downstream, be it through RSS, or on aggregation sites, from FriendFeed to Techmeme or even Digg. (See my post from last year on this topic)
Given that practically every blog is publishing to Twitter in parallel with their RSS feed, the drive to keep headlines short is very real. In my short visit to TechCrunch headquarters on Friday, their tech team said they are very much making sure the headlines play well with Twitter. Their Twitter account now not only shows a headline and a bit.ly URL (for stat tracking) but also the author's Twitter handle, similar to how I've called out posts from other writers on this site with their own IDs.
As Twitter's impact on immediate traffic expands, it should be interesting to see how many blogs change their approach to headlines, and to see if they are in any way reducing longer-term traffic benefits from SEO for instant returns.
As 
I've been 
Tech blogging is just as competitive, if not more competitive, than mainstream news. Nearly every blogger salivates over the tiniest little rumor that could turn into the scoop that lands you the top spot on 
Where do you get all the day's tech news? For many people, including me, it's 
Can you hear it? That's the sound of social media companies scrambling, hustling, and scraping to find new revenue-generating models to beat back the hounds of this wacky economy.
As blogging approaches the traditional role of journalism, traditional elements of journalism, including public relations firms, embargoes, briefings, and bias are going to surface, as they have with traditional marketing, media and business for centuries. 
It's a year-end tradition for many media, blogs and individuals, to predict what will happen over the next year. Some prefer to make their guesses fairly straight-forward in an effort to be right (Example: 
You would think that as 
Tech bloggers and readers are quite familiar with 
One downside of being in a visible leadership position is that you often have a bulls-eye on your back. Sometimes it's from your competition. Sometimes it's from people who feel what you offer isn't benefitting themselves personally, and other times, it can arguably be your biggest fans, who want to change what it is you do to serve their whim of the day. In the tech blogosphere, there is no single blog more influential and visible than 
I'm noticing a trend lately which started several months ago, and I couldn't quite pinpoint what was causing it. It seemed as though many of my friends and others that I esteemed as good bloggers were getting tired, and were posting much less frequently, or not at all. Many of these people were part of the reason I became an entrepreneur and it was disappointing to see them stop posting. It seems as though those blogging are getting tired, or just see it as a waste of time.
