Kent Newsome on technology, music and life

8/19/2007


Lost Horizon: Online Utopias, But for Whom?

Dwight Silverman has posted an interesting conversation he had with Steve Rubel on Twitter about blogging and the effect of social networks and related applications.  Steve has been spending an increasing amount of time using services like Twitter and Facebook, and as a result hasn't been blogging as much.  Dwight, on the other hand, is still excited about the blogging movement and believes, correctly in my opinion, that thanks to RSS, blogging has the most powerful API of all.

Dwight sums up my thoughts on the penetration of Twitter, etc. very nicely:

One of the dangers of keeping obsessive track of new things is forgetting that not everyone rides the cutting edge. Rubel's been thinking that, because he's all into Facebook and Twitter, that the majority of Internet users are, too.

You could write an encyclopedia on that statement.  Sometimes I feel like I have.  More and more, the tech-invested internet (we can't just refer to the blogosphere any more, as more and more people spend time behind the walls of the various social networks) seems to be comprised of a lot of grownups playing with toys and trying to convince the relatively few skeptics (and, of course, the entire non-tech population) that those toys are world-changing business tools.  I've never understood that, and I still don't.  Sure, there are the Chalmers Bryants talking their position as they scramble for their share of the gold.  But there are more than a few folks with no direct skin in the game who seem to be drinking the kool-aid too.

Let me say it once more...

Nobody, and I mean N-O-B-O-D-Y, in the real business world has the slightest idea what Twitter is, and if you tried to tell them, they wouldn't be the slightest bit interested.  Oh, unless they were in some corporate IT department- they'd be interested then, but only because they'd have to remember to block Twitter along with the free email and porn sites.  And even if they didn't, heavy use of Twitter at work would be about the same as heavy eBay use.  Not a career enhancing move.

Steve says that the action is moving away from blogs and towards applications like Twitter and Jaiku.  He agrees that RSS is a powerful API, but says it's limited, in that it only communicates one way.  The problem with that argument, of course, is that unless other users elect to "follow" you, Twitter, etc. is also one way communication.  Even if I had been on Twitter today, I couldn't have participated in Dwight and Steve's conversation, because I quit following Steve due to my Pink Floyd Policy.  In other words, I could elect to read what Steve and certain others have to say, but I can't participate.  Email is more two way than Twitter- at least if I email someone, I can be reasonably certain they'll see it. 

Dwight's thesis is that AOL, the grandfather of social networks, died because it became irritating to users- many of whom were happy to get their feet wet in the internet's kiddie pool, but later became unhappy when they wanted to do more - and access more- than the walled-in AOL would accommodate.  I've been using Facebook for about 3 months, and I'm already frustrated with it.  I feel like Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School every time I log in, and I find the interface to be very confusing and non-intuitive.

In other words, it's a little irritating.  Why is this fact wildly ignored by so many bloggers and former bloggers?  By so many, I mean the hundred or so people who write all Shangra-La about Facebook and the other social networks.

Again, I just don't get it.

Nor, I suspect, do the very large majority of the other grownups who get up and trundle off to work every morning- more worried about paying the bills than using the latest Facebook application.

As I wrote the other day, I find my application usage to be shrinking, rather than growing.  I simply don't have time to have all the fun that people claim to be having at Facebook, Second Life, Twitter, Pownce, etc.  Plus, every minute I spend writing there is a minute that both dilutes the brand I am trying to build at my blog and inures almost exclusively to the benefit of whoever thinks they're going to get rich by selling Facebook, etc. to Google or some Google wannabe.

Sure, I think it's nice to have "friends" on Facebook.  Yes, I log in once in a while to see what's going on behind the walls.  But all of that is ancillary to my greater online purpose: blogging outside the walls.  With other people.  In a conversation open to the world.  No walls, no silly jargon.

Dwight asks if blogging is passe.

Blogging has always been so 20 minutes ago- that's one of the things I like about it.  From the day Dave Winer invented it (along with just about everything else, it often seems), it has been a niche activity that serves a meaningful purpose- allowing regular folks like us to share and distribute information more efficiently- but for a limited number of people.  When people get all exercised about all of the social networks and related applications, they are not only diluting their personal brands, they are diluting the entire blogging movement.  A movement that the rest of the world has only just begun to notice.  At a time when we could be bringing blogging to the masses, we have lost our way and scattered our meager ranks across all manner of disparate and desperate locales.  I think that's the most troubling part of the application du jour internet mentality.

We are dispersing when we ought to be gathering.

The problem, of course, comes down to money.  No one is going to get rich because more people start blogging.  But if you can convince enough people to come to your web site, create a ton of content for free and, most importantly, get served a bunch of ads (note I didn't say watch them, because nobody does), then you might make some money one day.

In the meantime, I'll be here blogging.  Once in a while I'll visit the communities that form behind the walls, but they will never be my home.

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Posted by Kent @ 8/19/2007 11:07:00 PM | Permalink

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5 Comment(s):

Wow, this is one of your best posts, Kent. Lots to mull over, thanks!

By Anonymous Ethan, at 8/19/2007 11:53 PM  
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Finally someone who gets it! I've found that it doesn't matter how much you tell "normal" clients about how Social Networking is the wave of the future, they still look back at me with a blank stare and say, "yeah, but that doesn't really apply to my market."

The fact is, unless you're an uber-company with high-profile product, the average human being is not going to be following you around on Twitter, or poking you on Facebook, or in many cases, even reading your blog.

Great post, Kent.

By Blogger Dennis Belmont, at 8/20/2007 8:27 AM  
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I agree as well, Kent.

I took a mass-media class in college while I was flirting with a journalism major at the time.

One of the few things I remembered from that class was the following phrase: The Medium is the Massage (sic)

I picked up on the concept of blogging very quickly being a technical writer and documentarian for our IT group. It was a great and flexible way to convey a message in as much detail or brevity as appropriate.

My daughter tried blogging at age twelve two times and has dropped it (for now). Instead she has gravitated to MySpace where her friends also hang out. (Me? Too many ads and the interface looks like...well, you know...) But she expects an ad-saturated on-line environment. It's what her generation seems to expect...dare I say...even demand?

She tosses her nose at Twitter...who wants that! And many of the other social web waves crashing on the digital shores.

Between text messaging (IM gone portable) and MySpace for longer, brief chatter she is happy.

I carry a BlackBerry for my job and while I love being in the loop getting my full emails, my responses are brief or not at all. It just isn't a good fit for me with being able to comfortably communicate longer thoughts and concepts.

I took my wife to the doctor's office over the weekend and daughter wanted to stay home. So I was able to give her brief updates by text which fit perfectly with the medium. When I gave my wife's parent's an update, I called them...lots of questions lots of answers.

Yes blogging is a "niche" but it is a very critical one and isn't one-sided if done properly. Remember the "comments" if so enabled? A good blog post written for a target audience may generate some comments. Depending on the quality, those may generate a conversation between bloggers and readers. That conversation can then spawn new blogging content or concepts.

Which reminds me of another thing I picked up in college and still haven't been able to shake loose: Thesis, antithesis, synthesis

Good blogging is mix of repacking current content in an new and personal way for a select audience while also seeding it with fresh posts that have personal material that might not be current yet, but has the potential to be seen that way by someone who joins the audience.

To manage it all with the wealth of material on the Web? The humble old RSS feeds.

Kinda like the modern equivalent of opening up the paper and finding it has all the sections you want to read from all the papers you like to read.

I would hazard that the real "sages" of this digital age are those stalwarts who publish core materials that are accurate and self-generated. Surrounding them are the "bloggers" who are the village message-runners who help interpret the sage's messages and distribute it and expand it for the general village members. Then there are the villagers who just need to chatter and convey basic information as to who they are, what they are doing, and what they need.

It's a tiered distribution of information, and information transmittal methods dependent on the content being shared. Depending on where you sit and your role...you will choose the medium that best fits the message you carry or need to hear.

All are good and all have their own place in the village. The danger is in discounting one form as declining because we personally use another.

How we choose to covey our message says as much (or sometimes more) than the message we have to say itself.

I might just even take Dwight's blog post, and your blog post, and my comment here and remix them again with a post on my own blog.

Blogs are one-way conversations? Methinks not!

By Anonymous Claus Valca, at 8/20/2007 8:42 AM  
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Blogs are for those who have something to say. That's why your daughter, Claus, didn't get into it. She's more interested in the ongoing back-and-forth interaction common to her age, so social networking's more her speed. Someday, when she's inspired or passionate about a subject, she may come back to it.

You're right that blogging is not one-way; conversations take place in many ways -- in comments, between blogs, even between networks of blogs sometimes.

Kent, this is an excellent post, but one clarification. AOL's irritation didn't come just from its filtered view of the Internet -- you could, after all, launch IE or Netscape at the time and "surf naked" when connected to AOL -- but rather from its e-mail spam; its bloated software; its klunky interface; its worthless tech support; and its overwhelming adveritsing and marketing.

Facebook's becoming irritating with the proponderence of applications that are fun by pointless. I enjoyed the Zombie app when it first became available because it was funny. But now we've got all kinds of variants of it, and anytime someone wants us to participate in some social aspect involving that app, you must install it to complete the interaction. That's incredibly irritating, and it brings Facebook closer to MySpace. At this point, I want all these apps to just go away, to simplify things there. Even my daughter, who uses Facebook as many kids do, finds the constant app-attack annoying.

One of the things that becoming a Mac user has taught me is that simplicity increases the pleasure of usage. Maybe the guys at Facebook need to buy more Macs.

By Anonymous Dwight Silverman, at 8/20/2007 11:23 AM  
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As ever Kent, a thought provoking post. I've tried most of the new wave; Facebook, Pownce, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter.

I don't think any of them have legs (for me) with the exception of Facebook. I can't put my finger on it completely at the moment but it's the only one from which I've gotten any value; and probably not in a way that I expected.

It's as simple as knowing what colleagues at work get up to away from work and at the weekend; stimulating conversations when we bump into each other. Simple but amazingly powerful.

By Blogger Steve Newson, at 8/20/2007 2:04 PM  
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