Kent Newsome on technology, music and life

5/27/2007


More on Blogs vs Social Networks

Jay Neely follows up on our conversation about blogs and social networks and the differences between the two:

What's the difference between a social network and blogs or a blogging service? One is for your friends, the other is for your audience. The key difference is that one group already knows you (it's easy to replace "friends" with "coworkers", "family", "neighbors", etc).

As I mentioned the other day, there is logic to that distinction.  But the more I think about it, I don't believe it's as clear-cut as that.

Jay says bloggers write for their audience.  Clearly some do, like Guy Kawasaki, the folks at Mashable and other bloggers with one foot remaining in the old media pool.  But lots of other bloggers are writing not merely to have a soapbox, but for the multi-way conversations that are a central part of the blogging experience.  Robert Scoble is the best example of a popular blogger who, it seems to me, approaches blogging from this perspective.  Doc Searls is another.

There are other reasons why Jay's line of demarcation sometimes breaks down.  Take connecting with old friends, for example.  Very few, if any, of my real world friends even know what Facebook is.  None (to my knowledge) use it.  As a result, I will have a much better chance connecting with people I know by nurturing my web site and waiting for people to Google me.

It's the same with new friends.  No one will ever accuse me of being shy, but at the same time, I'm not big on chatting online with people I don't know.  That's the reason Second Life lost its appeal to me.

On the other hand, I have made a bunch of friends via cross-blog conversations- many of them from other states, countries and continents.  Chip Camden, Earl Moore, Randy Morin, Blonde 2.0, Brad Kellett, Dave Wallace, Ethan Johnson, Frank Gruber, Hugh MacLeod, Nick Carr, Martin Gordon, Mathew Ingram, Susan Getgood, Mike Miller, Ric Hayman, Richard Querin, Rick Mahn, Seth Finkelstein, Steven Streight, TDavid, Tom Morris and Warner Crocker are just a few of the people I likely would never have become friends with if I had set up camp in Facebook.

Plus, the community that develops via cross-blogging is so much more meaningful than merely adding a few hundred "friends" to the botton of your butt ugly MySpace page.  When I visit MySpace I see very little that looks like a real community.  Mostly, I see a gallery of bad web design.

Granted, the cross-blogging community is distributed, inefficient and sometimes impolite.  But it exists, and without walls.

I think Jay is onto something, and I hope he keeps writing about it.  But at the moment, we're all standing on the tip of the iceberg.  Below the surface are a lot of other forces at work.

These lines that seem bright and pretty today may disappear completely tomorrow.

Or they may begin to look like walls.

Technorati tags: , ,

Posted by Kent @ 5/27/2007 09:48:00 PM | Permalink

Submit to: Digg | Netscape | Reddit | Tailrank
Bookmark on: Del.icio.us | Furl | Ma.gnolia
Reactions: 7 Comments | Post a Comment | Inbound Links

7 Comment(s):

MySpace is the pits. As a result of my efforts to track down former classmates, I found two who use MySpace and their pages are atrocious. I don't begrudge them not knowing HTML, but gaaaahhhh.

One of the two explained that she is only on that service because her child is. She wants to know what he's doing online, and didn't feel that she'd have that insight without being on board. I don't use the service and have no intention to, but that was an interesting angle.

And thanks again for the mention. I'm feeling massively guilty for not linking to you more, but based on what I have been writing lately it would come off as uh, pandering I guess. :-( Hopefully the comments "count".

Oh - but I will be writing a little something about "conversations" so expect linkage one of these days.

By Anonymous Ethan, at 5/27/2007 11:28 PM  
**************************

I think what you are missing is the element I call "group grooming" (after the anthropological meaning). While all human groups do this to some extent, just as part of socializing, A-listers have it as primary importance - because usually they really depend on that sort of group grooming (in one way or another) to maintain their prominence. The A-listers are NOT having a "conversation" with you - they are backscratching each other. DO NOT CONFUSE THESE! They *call* it "conversation", since that's a very nice word. But a tail doesn't become a leg even if you call it one.

By Blogger Seth Finkelstein, at 5/27/2007 11:49 PM  
**************************

Ethan, I have read about other parents using MySpace to better understand what their kids are doing. Makes sense to me.

Seth, I agree with you about the A-Lister thing. There are exceptions (Hugh being one conversant A-Lister, thus mentioned above), but generally the conversations I value are the ones with the folks listed above and others in my reading list who aren't particularly interested in being anything other than a tail.

What is interesting to me is watching a tail react to approbations by the legs. Do they stay true to themselves or do they turn to the darkside in the hope of continued inclusion. It's a sorry business, which I why I advocate setting up camp down here at the bottom and changing the game a little.

By Blogger Kent, at 5/28/2007 1:08 AM  
**************************

Funny... the larger my blog gets, the less it feels to me like it's for an "audience", and more for people I know personally.

I suppose part of that id due to the fact that when I started blogging, my friends mostly didn't read it, at least not regularly. The people who followed it were people I didn't know personally.

But over time, I've met so many of my readers "in the flesh"...

By Anonymous hugh macleod, at 5/28/2007 5:42 AM  
**************************

Hey again, Kent!

There are definitely places where the line blurs. I think more people in the mainstream discover blogging through the personal journal of a friend than they they do through one of the tech commentary sites we all enjoy so much. But popular blogs aren't popular if you're only writing for friends.

Scoble links out a lot, and often to people he knows, but what he writes about are events and technologies. If he were to lose track of his platform, his blog's central themes, by just writing about people he knows and hanging out with them, he would lose his readership.

It's great to have friends who read your blog, fantastic to get feedback from them, and fun to insert a nod to them in a post now and then, but unless you're writing a personal journal, your blog isn't for them. It's for a wider audience.

It's interesting to me that you say you wouldn't have made the friends you have if you had setup camp with Facebook. I felt like one of the key points of my post(which maybe I should elaborate on later) is that when you have different tools for different purposes, there's no reason not to use both.

Like you, I can't stand MySpace. So I'm mainly on Facebook, which I check once every couple of days, and is a fantastic tool for seeing what's new with people, if there are any birthdays coming up, etc. My close friends I'll call up if I see that something exciting is happening. And every now and then, if I see an update from someone I haven't heard from in a while, I'll write a message to them just to catch up for a bit. It keeps that weak tie alive. And there's no reason you can't be blogging as well, and making friends in the blogosphere.

Part of it is a generational thing. Looking at your About page, you talk about writing software in the 80s, so I'm guessing you're at least in your late 30s right now. Let's keep this between the two of us(and your comment readers), but I'm about to turn 21. For my generation, social networking sites are already known as the place to go to reconnect. And I bet you'd be surprised how many more people you used to know that you could find on Reunion.com than through a Google search.

In the end, it's about the people, not the services. And online, people will be as findable as their web presence allows them to be. Until we create a truly portable and secure identity system for the web, our presences will only be as strong as their dispersement and activity. Social networks are easy enough that it's easy to be active on one as well as a blog. The real challenge is when you start trying to be active on more than one.

Best,
Jay Neely, Social Strategist

By Blogger Jay, at 5/28/2007 9:33 AM  
**************************

Kent:
I have made as many good friends from blogging as I have from being on the different social networks. I don't think my friends on the social networks know me better than those I met through my blog. If anything, those who read my writings probably have a better sense of my beliefs and values. My readers are making much more of an effort to get to know me than simply clicking on a button that says "add as friend".
I do find this issue very interesting though. May also write a post soon about my thoughts on the topic.

By Blogger Blonde 2.0, at 5/28/2007 1:45 PM  
**************************

Kent:
Please see my post on the topic:
http://blonde2dot0.blogspot.com/2007/05/blogs-vs-social-networks.html

By Blogger Blonde 2.0, at 5/29/2007 8:15 PM  
**************************

Post a Comment

Links to this post:
DISCLAIMER
Newsome.Org, Kent's blog and the related pages and content are solely the thoughts and opinions of Kent Newsome in his personal capacity and are not associated with any other person or entity, including, without limitation, any partnership or other business entity Kent may now or hereafter be associated with.