That's too bad, because if you don't target your writing style to your medium you're never going to have any readers.

You're going to produce the literary equivalent of a Java desktop application: Generic, out-of-place no matter where it goes, and slightly tone-deaf, like a sentence in a foreign language that's gone through an automated translation system.

Twitter is a social space with its own rules, traditions, and capabilities. Facebook is its own thing. Blogging is its own thing. Email is its own thing. HN comments are their own thing. Get these genres confused and you're gonna pull a Google Buzz. "Oh, I can derive a social network out of people's email address books and suddenly email will work just like Facebook!" Um, no. That's creepy and wrong, because my address book isn't my friends list, and email isn't like a Facebook status update.

These days, my own favorite writing medium appears to be the HN comment. I can't really explain why. But the style is unique: This comment wouldn't work on Twitter, chopped up into a slew of 140-character haiku. It would make a poor blog post -- it's too dependent on HN context, it doesn't stand on its own, and I'm mortally afraid to try and title it. [1] It would scarcely make an article or a book -- that would require actual thought! My Facebook friends don't care about hypothetical issues in social media design. If I wanted to email this to people, what list of recipients would I choose, and how could I be sure that I wasn't just spamming them?

Electronic media haven't diversified because we're somehow unable to figure out a standard. They've diversified because people like them that way. We like a variety of media, perhaps because the audience we find in one medium is never quite like the audience in another, and because the constraints of a particular medium help us to shape our creations.

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[1] Perhaps my problem with blogging as a medium is that blog posts need both a headline and a body. They say that every additional field in a form halves the response rate.

When I'm in the mood to write a block of text I want to write, not waste time trying to sum up that writing with a pithy title and figuring out which tags to apply to it. The urge to be a writer is different from the urge to be a publisher or a librarian.