Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited Vincent to write about innovative start ups based in the Netherlands, Apple, the media industry, incubators, business books and many other things that happen to interest him at the moment. Vince, they’re all yours!

This is a response to Kari’s recent post on “Blogging, evolved?” To start, I don’t actually disagree with what he wrote, but I do have my own opinion on blogs in general and where it is going, and this is the tale of that. Some key-points, Kari mentioned, were several alternatives to blogs, like forums and Slashdot (you forgot Wikis), as well as derivatives of the format such a Twitter, Jaiku, and Tumblr. Regarding the latter, I’ve been running a tumblr-blog for a month now, and I love it. It represents a refreshing lightness versus traditional blogging. But that’s not what I will write about, although you can see it as a consequence.

Where is media going?

There are a number of players that fill the road between where the news comes from to the readers. Companies can release their own press-releases, wars happen, presidents get elected, children get kidnapped, etc. All of which can then be re-released on a newswire like Reuters, and re-reported on other traditional news-formats, like newspapers, newspaper-sites, televisions, and such. This content is not yet discussed by the people, except orally perhaps, rather by reputable journalists and analysts. If interesting/controversial enough, it is then pushed further towards blogs, forums, and aggregators, like Technorati, Digg, TechMeme, Slashdot, Reddit, etc. etc. If it is eternal news, it will also get added to Wikipedia.

Actually my little story makes it look like a single line from the event to the aggregator, but I think it happens in parallel from the event to different types of publications to different crowds of people, which can be segregated in technological, non-technological, casual, loyal, geek, non-geek, etc.

Where is the conversation going?

Is conversation important? It is of vital importance! There are several factors, which I think contribute to conversation. A. people like to talk where other people are. B. people will respond more to questions like “what kind of pie do you like?” than “my recipe for pie is x+y, discuss.” C. people discuss popular/controversial content more. And D. people prefer discussing in formats that facilitate talking.

What’s interesting about stories on Digg.com is that often very popular stories, with 1000+ diggs, can receive 200 comments on Digg, and no comments on the blog itself. If you look at many newspaper-articles, they don’t even include the ability to comment, but more and more frequently the ability to aggregate. Indeed, Digg.com is one of the places conversation is going for some of the reasons I mentioned above. Many people, simple blurbs, popular content is pushed up., and moderated. Alternatively, you have stuff like Meebo, and the Facebooks of this world, etc., which also attract conversation. Many Tumblrs, frustrated with the lack of commenting, installed a Meebo-widget to still enable talking. Interesting. And my brother, who has a Facebook account, just communicates via MSN.

One conclusion to draw from this is that conversation does not necessarily need to happen on the same platform as the original reason for discussing. Another is that technologies that facilitate chatting, like a nice interface, moderation, threading, etc., are favoured by the masses for communication.

RSS, a killer-feature?

To Robert Scobble, who is an apparent information-junkie, RSS means he can read 400 feeds every morning. To my iPod, it means I can download a ton of podcasts and read text-files of blogs and articles. To my modded Xbox, it means I can watch Youtube-content in painfully crappy resolutions on my television. In other words, if you are an information-junkie or a machine (or both), RSS is great. And if you want to distribute content, RSS is great also.

In the normal world, on the other hand, much is decided by input = output. It’s a classic theory, Taylorism or Scientific Management, but most businesses just want to see their employees produce x widgets per day. And getting more RSS (or email) doesn’t help these people. For blogs, RSS is not perfect either, as it enables aggregators to take their content and leave the blog collecting dust.

Conclusion

Blogging is an amazing platform for creating content, no matter what form it takes. In many cases it’s free, it requires little administrative overhead, it’s easily distributable content. It’s good for publishing, second only to Wiki’s, but it needs an interface-update. For conversation it is limited, because it is not designed for it. And that’s the problem with a lot of products, to try and design for everything. Great platforms for conversations are on the other hand, Digg, Slashdots, forums, chat, etc. Because they are designed with the conversation in mind.

The optimal future for blogs is a hybrid of blog-posts with great content and with a Digg/Meebo/etc.-button. (Unfortunately Wordpress didn’t allow me to add a digg-button to illustrate that point.)

Like

Unlike