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Blogging 2.0

Notes from a roundtable discussion for Microsoft on the future of blogging.

Notes from a roundtable discussion for Microsoft on the future of blogging. Ian Delaney's speaker notes for the session, crossposted from his personal blog. Apologies for their sketchiness.

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 allegedly 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