Like many, I’ve been more active on Twitter lately than my blog. It’s hard to explain why, for many of the same reasons Twitter is hard to explain in the first place. You either get it, or you don’t.

I was just reading a post from someone who begs folks to “Twitter Less, Blog More.” One of the reasons he gives:

Even if you don’t like to think in abstract terms, there are material reasons to opt to blog something instead of Twittering it. In the long run every backlink and every visitor count. Guess what, every time you Twitter instead of blogging something interesting you are risking to lose visitors and backlinks.

Guess what? That’s exactly the reason I’ll put something on Twitter instead of blogging it. And it’s part of the reason why I don’t publish my Twitter stream here. There are times, more often than not lately, where I just want to be part of the conversation without all the baggage.

I’m still a little blog-shy. Last year, some of this blog’s archives from 2006 were taken out of context, twisted and used against me in a legal case. That’s about as much as I’m going to say about that right now. Rest assured. I do plan to blog the details at some point when I feel it’s safe to do so. If for no other reason than to serve as a warning to other parents fighting for appropriate services for their children.

We often forget that the average person doesn’t see the difference between sites that report news in blog format and personal blogs that react to news in the moment. What I’m writing this minute is how I feel and how I see the world at 7:14 am on Sunday, April 27, 2008. That may change at 7:14 pm tonight, or it may change in a week or month from now. But because I’m blogging this, it will have more permanence than if I put these thoughts on Twitter in between my thoughts on 100 other topics that I may tweet about.

Here, I refuse to go back and edit/delete posts. If it’s clear I’m editing after-the-fact what I posted in the past, how can you trust that I believe what I’m saying right now? I haven’t even removed or edited the posts that were used against me. I’ll say I’ve changed my mind. I won’t change the past to catch up to the present. It’s a losing game.

Yes, I know that with my tweets on the public timeline everything I say there is for the world’s eyes and it can still come back and haunt me later. I’m careful in my tweets, especially as the legal matter referenced above is not resolved. But somehow, 140 characters caught in between completely irrelevant content clearly says “this was in the moment” in a way that a blog post never can.