Blogging 2.0

I’ve been told-​​off by proper, real-​​world people twice in the last week or so for not blogging enough. Sorry. Writing about digital media at work seems to have decreased my desire to write about digital media some more once I get home. (To counter some objec­tions, NMK has a ‘beta’ RSS feed here). However, my boss has agreed that ‘blogging time’ be allowed as ‘work time’. Not sure how that pans out when I say, “Sorry, no articles on the site today, but I did do a blog post.” I hope to do better. kthxbai.

Anyway. Tomorrow, I have been asked to say a few words on the topic of ‘Blogging 2.0′ at a roundtable dis­cus­sion organ­ised by Microsoft and Weber Shandwick (one of their PR houses). It’s a title that I’m sure will make all regular readers cringe and I’ll be equally sure to point out that it was none of my doing. Since it’s a closed event, I thought I’d share my notes here. Hope they make enough sense to be worth reading.

The future of blogging must be con­nected to why people blog now

• It’s about our current nature [I am a socialist, not an essen­tialist]. There is cur­rently a human urge to com­mu­nicate, share and to connect. Most of us [at the event] are pro­fes­sional writers in some sense and feel that more keenly than most perhaps and do it every day anyway, but it’s not just us.
• Equal current human urge to make a mark or be recorded. Symptomatic of our sense of anonymity and ali­en­a­tion in post-​​industrial world?, though diaries are hardly a new thing.
• As a con­venient tool for know­ledge man­age­ment. Search on my blog is faster and better than search on my computer. [shame on you, MS]. Easier to use than a wiki.
• Self-​​promotion or business pro­mo­tion. [let’s be honest, eh]
• Public spaces that serve a com­munity function (the local pub, the play­ground, the park, the village square) no longer exist, are thought unsafe or are no longer ful­filling that function. So we seek altern­at­ives. I have found many RL friends through my blog — that wouldn’t happen if I stood in the park: I’d get arrested or something.

And also why they don’t blog

• Too technical/​geeky — - not so for very long — every 16 yr old leaving school now has always had the Internet. They’ve had wiki­pedia since they were old enough to use it — ’99. I think it will lead to increased usage of solu­tions like drupal, joomla and b2evolution, if anything.
• Too much effort — well, it is. It’s not like any of us are getting paid unless it gets us a new job or new clients. Adsense not working e.g. Guy Kawasaki
• Nothing to say — my mum, very english, very humble woman wouldn’t want to make her views public in the same way she’d never write a letter to a paper — but it doesn’t have to be a pub­lishing platform, it can also be a com­mu­nic­a­tion platform — nearly all east asian blogs, for example, are for friends and family.
• No time/​No interest — I think there may be passive solutions.

Paid-​​for blogging services?

Models:

• Straightforward hosting — I pay some­thing like $6 per month for hosting and $10 a year for domain name.
• But DIY requires intent. Ppl don’t pay for things or put effort into things they can get for free.
• Typepad.com — £5 a month for a hosted service — has been v.popular with pro bloggers but now haem­or­rhaging users moving to free services like wordpress.com, blogger.com.
• WordPress.com — pro accounts for more traffic; more control over design. Not going to do it unless funded somehow, though.
• eTribes.com — bolt-​​ons for extra space and mobile apps; no one I know uses it.

What other altern­at­ives exist/​could work?

Some recent trends and ideas that may show the way forward

Microblogging

• Rise of Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook status messages as an altern­ative to blogging.
• These things are even more intimate than most blogs — trend towards ‘self sur­veil­lance’, putting all your activity on show.
• They are about main­taining presence and rela­tion­ships more than anything else
• Rise of the tumblelog — tumblr.com — more scrap­book than anything else — useful and easy to maintain
• Bloggers often run out of steam — 100x more aban­doned blogs than active ones — some­thing easier and less stress-​​inducing required?

Atomisation

• Thanks to the magic of RSS, the basic atom of the blog is the post. These can be remixed and re-​​assembled by readers/​users anyway they like.

This has led to:

• Rise of the Feed Reader and con­sequent decline of the page view. Subscribers are a more important index than impres­sions, if you offer full RSS. And if you don’t, then you’ve lost the atten­tion of the blog­gerati. Why should you care? They’re linkers.
• Rise of the widget — it’s RSS for ppl who don’t know what RSS stands for. MySpace, Netvibes, Pageflakes — roll your own internet and never leave your homepage. Facebook apps doing the same for that platform. UK gone facebook mad, it seems, in last month or so.

Collaboration

• Blogging plat­forms are cur­rently poor on this, hence the rise [in some ways] of wikis, which are a night­mare in terms of user exper­i­ence. Yet I think the col­lab­or­ative blog has legs. Forums remain a very strong vehicle and are a product of com­munity. How can we bring that com­munity feeling into the blogging platform?
• Current ‘half-​​way houses’ are weak for this — Vox, Live Spaces, MU WordPress remains an under-​​resourced, niche platform.

Passive Activity

• Tim O’Reilly — “the best web 2.0 services are passive” — e.g. Google search, Last.fm.
• We might be able to pass­ively blog — sites that collect all our activ­ities e.g. iStalkr, tumblr, Facebook apps

Dangers/​Counter-​​Forces

• Spam — spam has already eaten email, usenet and many forums — one reason for rise of web 2.0 services is that email has become so very inef­fi­cient for so many purposes. Akismet and Captchas do a sterling job, but the spammers are clever bastards.
• Identity/​Privacy Crisis Looming — your next phone will have a facebook inter­face, a col­league sug­gested to me other day, and I can believe it — BUT we’re used to our iden­tities being linked to contexts e.g. with mates, with the boss, with col­leagues, with family, with lovers. Now, inten­tion­ally or not, people are mashing all that up. That’s good in a way, but very odd for most of us at the same time.

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