DON’T SPIKE ME, BRO! Welcome to the new, Twitterized kausfiles.com.  Tweets and blog items in the same stream.  Why do this? 1) I spend a lot of time and energy on Twitter. 2) Twitter was and is killing blogging. What used to be the fun short blog items are now tweets, leaving only the duller, long items for blogs — a drift toward dreariness accelerated by the need to attract links by writing Important Posts, and by Google’s apparent decision to favor longer posts in its search results (on the highly questionable theory that short posts are inherently less informative). I always thought readers preferred shorter items. The hell with Google.

This new format should, in theory, put the fun items back on the blog. It will also allow 140 character tweets to be expanded into longer items. Best of all, from my point of view, none of these items will have to have a big, joke-killing headline — my main beef with the WordPress-based blogs I’ve been writing ever since the tragic Slate redesign of 2008. The result should look more like kausfiles’ blog originally looked, back in the day.

We’ll see. Experimentation is ongoing. I just learned, for example, that if I try to modify a tweet on this site it causes a break in the space-Twitter continuum that destroys everything on kausfiles. So I won’t do that! Tweets will appear here unchanged — though some will be deleted, sometimes to be later expanded and reposted as items.

Please let me know in the comments of any problems or suggestions.  My thanks to John Keegan of PressHarbor for putting this all together.