A few days back Om Malik published a blog post called ‘The Evolution of Blogging,’ which (among other things) asserted that:
Blogging needs to be social. There are many reasons for this, but the most important one — in my mind — is the changing nature of content. “We will all be streaming life moments as more and more bandwidth is available both at home and on the go,” I wrote two years ago.
True, we will all be streaming more life moments as technology allows us to do so. But won’t those moments become less and less interesting as they become more numerous? For example, if I write a blog post about the most remarkable thing to happen in a given day, then naturally if I were to write a second blog post then that would be the second most remarkable thing that happened.
This is why I don’t read lifestreams. I confess, I just don’t like FriendFeed or Storytlr pages. My theory is that as lifestream posts become more frequent, they also become less and less remarkable, not to mention disjointed. When I scan someone’s lifestream I rarely see anything of substance unless they’ve included a link to — you guessed it — a blog post. I’m not saying there aren’t exceptions, because there are indeed some Twitter users that can project a strong and interesting voice in less than 140 characters.
Malik mentions services like Posterous and Tumblr as examples of more streamy/social blog forms. But while I love the ease of use of both these platforms, I think their linear nature kinda blows. This is why I switched from Google Reader to Netvibes as my primary RSS reader. I like to scan stuff. I don’t want to unfurl a fucking newspaper in ball-of-yarn format. Scroll, scroll, scroll, next page, scroll some more… Jeez.
Are you really being social?
I think being truly ’social’ means that you are getting to know people. The value of blogs lie in the fact that they usually require deeper thought (and again, I’m not saying there aren’t exceptions on the lifestream side). I love blogs where people write in-depth thoughts and ideas, like Ryan’s McLaughlin’s post called ‘I am an Atheist’ which showed he had more convictions than any bible-thumper I’ve ever known. I love when people document their growth too, like Chris Amico’s foray into programming or John Biesnicker and his journey through languages. That stuff is golden.
Blogs undeniably have more staying power too. Like Hey, can you find me that really insightful tweet you sent me two weeks ago? Yeah, I thought not. Blog posts are not as likely to disappear downstream once the day is done. Things are categorized, archived, tagged, and linked to, thus connecting them to the main page, i.e. connecting them to the present.
Lifestreams make excellent hubs, but they’re just that. Hubs. When I want to know what someone is all about I go to their blog. Having said all that I do recognize that blogs need to evolve, but just not socially. Much like online news stories they frequently need updates or revisions, and in this sense I think they do need to evolve. If Wordpress instituted a wiki-like revisions standard as part of its core, perhaps it might catch on.
Getting back on track, there are probably going to be some hippies out there who think that ’social-ness’ is like ketchup and that you can never have too much. With all due respect to that crowd, you can be on as many social networks as you want — but if you’re not taking the time to share the shit that matters most to you, then you really aren’t being very social at all.
h/t to Paul for the Om Malik link.
Photo from download squad.
Love your post, Rick. It reminds me of the discussion we had on Twitter (kinda of livestreaming there, heh ^^) when I mentioned blog strategy.
I agree with you that most lifestreams are useless. Too much noise, not enough coherence. This is why I’m trying and still struggling to find a way to talk about all the subjects that matter to me (social media, Japan, photography, etc …yes I may have too many, was born like this) in a consolidated way.
The problem with lifestreams or social broadcasters (or shouters) is that everything goes. The tuning has to been done by the receiver, while I think it should be done by the sender (to a point), like choosing a TV channel. I want to find a way that allows for people to follow only the topics of interest, not forcing them to go through useless blog entries for them. I think I’ve found how to do it, but the coding required to do it is too big for my time now. I’ll wait until Wordpress MU is integrated into WP to play with it. Or do it in a simpler way.
You have a very interesting way of balancing your blogs, yet I sometimes wish I had a single channel to see what you’re doing. It’s Twitter for now, but I hope technology allows us to find smarter ways not to shout.
Cheers,
Paul.
Cheers Paul. I think it’s important to focus more on the message rather than the medium. But having send that, I don’t want to throw a bunch of garbage at a reader and say “Hey, there’s a message in there somewhere for you!”
As for my blogs, yeah — they tend to be all over the map. But I tend to be myself the most here, for better or for worse. I don’t really want them all in a single channel, because they’re all different topics. I do have a catch-all feed (1rick.com/rss), but I don’t recommend using it!
Cheers for putting me on to that Malik article. And thx for the thoughts.
R.