Pat Matthews, founder and president of local superstar Mailtrust, posted this in his twitter feed yesterday:

Twitter makes blogging virtually irrelevant. Twitter makes email more relevant than ever. [ Twitter ]

Provocative thought. Damn shame it’s limited to 140 characters.

Twitter serves a different purpose.  It’s difficult to express a complex idea in Twitter, even more difficult to have an extended conversation about it. Arguing politics — or anything you care about — over Twitter is pointless, enraging, and makes you look foolish. (I know.) For those things (and more) you still need weblogs.

Mike Miner discusses the idea in greater length. He sees a more symbiotic relationship:

A blog is a great place to put your content – to focus on the stuff that you’re creating. Twitter is a great way to share and be exposed to information. It’s a kind of ambient medium – in the background, not barging in like a phonecall or requiring your complete or continued attention to use like a newspaper. A blog is great for what you’re putting out, Twitter is great for what you’re pulling in. [ Twitter vs. Blogs ]

So no, Twitter doesn’t make blogging irrelevant. But it does do blogging two vital services.

How Twitter makes Blogging Better

Before Twitter, blogs were started for the wrong reasons and posts were made that really shouldn’t have been made. Blogs are great at informal, long-form writing. They suck at the “here’s an interesting link” and “let’s keep up with friends.”  Now that crap goes on Twitter.

But that “here’s an interesting link” thing is gold for blogs. Before, you had to rely on search engines and the alpha-bloggers picking you out and spreading you around (which was a bit like winning the lottery). Twitter is actually a pretty darn good one for word of mouth marketing. I’m finding a lot of smaller weblogs, interesting writing, and interesting people through Twitter.

And I’m getting more traffic through Twitter than I ever anticipated.

Twitter doesn’t supplant blogs, it feeds them. This is what Mike Miner means when he says Twiiter is for what you’re “taking in,” blogs for what you’re “putting out.”

From that standpoint at least, saying Twitter makes blogs irrelevant is kind of like saying you don’t need the product any more because you have the advertising.

The new replaces the old

Mike Miner also says:

I think there’s a pervasive myth in the public that when it comes to online communication, the new destroys the old.

But it doesn’t. Not always. Often, the “new” just becomes another tool, one better suited to a particular situation than others. Blogs will still be here and be bloggy. Microblogging serves another need, Facebook yet another. Message boards still thrive.

And there are still short-wave radio enthusiasts who will no doubt see their Renaissance when ED spam breaks the back of the Net.

It’s all tools, and you still need the right tool for the right job. Twitter is not going to be the right tool for everyone.

After all. You do only get 140 characters.