global voices, one world

blogging delivered by att

Mark Jones, global community editor at Reuters, has a fabulous post on whether blogs have to be opinionated or not, suggesting that most top blogs are actually more about providing information than giving an opinion.

Way back when, when blogs first appeared on the scene, I remember the excitement about blogging being a personalized filter for the web. Literally, a weblog would log what a person was browsing on the web, linking to interesting sites with maybe a line or two of commentary and description. Weblogs were highly personal – the initial promise was that if you found a person similar to you in taste, you could follow this person’s weblog and you would likely be offered links to websites you might find interesting but otherwise would not come across yourself. As Mark Jones argues, the top weblogs still follow this spirit of sharing the best of the web.

As weblogs evolved, and more people joined the fray, the blog as a medium turned more towards a style resembling “writing an e-mail to the world” (as overheard from David Sasaki). Where people share their stories with the world, however mundane or exciting. You might call this the point where blogs where no longer solely about information (if they were ever) but increasingly about narrative, story and opinion.

But to think about blogs as information or opinion misses part of the picture. Blogs are also about conversation and communication. At one point, comments as a function of weblogs became indispensable to the idea of a blog, that is to say, a blog has to have comments, and those who don’t are the exceptions. Blogs evolved into a medium where conversation and communication became important narrative forms, not just information and opinion. They became a two-way mode of communication, not just one-way. Unfortunately, spam comments largely drowned out most conversation a blog was fostering (my ratio of spam to real comment is maybe 99 to 1, I’d have to check my Akismet stats). Conversation also started to flow to more private and less public venues – where it is more clear who you are talking with (not just talking with ‘the world’), venues such as Facebook and Twitter.

Paul Boutin from Wired argues that this means blogging is dead. But blogging is changing – it is true that some of the earlier things you would do with blogs are increasingly moving to other venues – “bookmarks + comments” is now delicious, while “immediate comments” is now twitter and where “sharing with friends” is moving to facebook. So what are blogs these days? Robert Scoble succinctly states in the Wired article that he keeps his blog mostly for long-form writing. Long-form writing? That’s fascinating. We have come full circle. Blogging used to be about links, comments and immediacy – that is twitter now. Journalism was/is about long-form in-depth writing. What Scoble suggests is that blogging is increasingly moving into this space. Where twitter is now the new blogging, blogging is now on its way to become the new journalism.

EDIT: the spam to “ham” (real comment) ratio is not 99 to 1, but more like 999 to 1. Crazy.