Blogging, evolved? Another opinion.
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.)
Related posts:
Business strategy, Entertainment, Friends, Networks, blogging, innovation, marketing, media, user-generated content
“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.)
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Jeremy, it’s up to you now !
The second someone adds a Digg this-button I’m out of here… =)
Good points, Vincent. I agree with a lot of stuff, but I agree that Digg and friends are substitutes for blog’s own comments. At least my experience, the context forces the commentary to be rather Digg-centric and meta-commentary. Of course, this combined with your notion that there are more comments on Digg-side of things than in the the blog they link to, raises an interesting idea… should blog owners outsource their commenting?
No, I don’t think so. I think conversation is something that happens automatically and cannot be restricted to certain mediums. Maybe the possibility should exist yes.
As far as Digg goes, I completely agree that it somewhat degrades the conversations and I much prefer the informed comments on this blog.
But as we reach a certain point of conversation, it is better to move that towards a medium that is more suitable for it. One example is Macrumors.com, which is just a blog, but all it’s comments are outsourced to the Macrumors-forum. It works great. A negative example is the case of Kathy Sierra and her excellent, but now dead weblog, where she shut it down because of death-threats. As was shown on Digg, while similar comments were made for that same story, the community quickly moderated those comments away and it made it a more pleasant experience. The same for Slashdot.
In my opinion, (popular) blogs need features that make dealing with a lot of comments easier, such as threading and meta-moderation. And maybe this should be outsourced. But I don’t think this is a priority for TI3 (my acronym for this blog) now.
Something to add. As conversations become more fragmented, there is also a need for tracking these on a centralised level. Techmeme does a great job of this, I’m not sure how, but it’s brilliant at it and quickly becoming my favourite aggregator.
The Macrumors.com approach is similar to the approach at worsethanfailure.com, which I mentioned in my original piece. In a larger community sites like MacRumors and WTF, I think it’s a good idea to integrate a forum for comments. Major forum software like phpBB and vBulletin are quite mature and have excellent UIs for managing user’s multiple comments and discussions. This is my favourite solution today. It’s a bit complex solution for smaller blogs.
If anyone of you used BBSs in the time long gone, you might remember the “offline readers” you could use to just sync the discussions quickly and work on them offline. Of course, this was before (cheap) broadband, internet and when desktop applications still matttered =)
Some online aggregators (like Newsgator) have tried to build their own commenting system, but they’re restricted to the users of that certain aggregator and they usually suck.
…this is insane. Just after I wrote that, I went to Google Reader (my favourite) and noticed a new shiny link. Offline. “Now this is retro”, I thought.
And how does it work? Well, apparently Google launched something called Google Gears yesterday. Microsoft and Adobe, Google just entered into offline web apps competition.
I strongly advise to take a look at it.
Rss-readers should definitely have an offline feature, if only for mobile usage. Some desktop-readers already implement this.
Regarding forums, it’s a controversial issue. Sure, it’s excellent for what it does, but it also seems to attract trolls and groups of trolls, wherever I go. Maybe the format promotes groupthink, I’m not sure. For a blog-writer it’s preferable to keep control of the conversation in some way. But I do like the Slashdot way. If you browse from 3-5 points up, you have some great comments.
Where meta-news is also done right, I love the way Google Finance implements it. I set up a portfolio of stocks and it gives me related news, related blog-posts, related group-discussions, and related videos, in addition to the financials. It really gives you a very complete picture of what is going on with a stock. That, in my view, is the power of rss, implemented the right way.
If it stands alone, I’m not a big fan of the rss-format. I could write a whole post on the psychology of how we humans read, but it’s not in a linear way that rss (and blogs) are presented in. Newspapers have a much better format for this, and so do perhaps Wikis.