The Great Conversation Migration: Go With The Flow

Louis Gray has posted some thoughts that have caused the question about the appropriate locus for web commentary to boil up again:

[from louisgray.com: Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners' Ire?: Silicon Valley Blog

Some of us have just as loudly asked for comments and conversations to enter the world of the RSS feed reader. Now that we're starting to see what it's like, maybe it's not what we had fully anticipated. But it's the way things are headed, and rather than label innovators like Matt Shaulis (Twitter | FriendFeed) and Dave Stanley of Shyftr (Twitter | FriendFeed) as outrageous or possibly illegitimate, we should engage and speak up about what we think is right. As for the developers who enable these services, there are definitely ways they can help raise the visibility of the practice - through e-mail alerts, trackbacks, or even giving the option to opt out. But we'll be seeing this more and more going forward. I promise you that.

This is closely related to the conversation moving from blogs to Twitter, as I mentioned in Beyond Blogs: The Conversation Has Moved Into The Flow:

Basically, conversation is moving from a very static and slow form of conversation -- the comments thread on blog posts -- to a more dynamic and fast form of conversation: into the flow in Twitter, Friendfeed, and others. I think this directionality may be like a law of the universe: conversation moves to where is is most social.

Let's face it: people do not leave a page on someone's blog open all day, waiting to see if someone shows up there to chat. But people do open Twitter, or their RSS readers, and leave them open all day, and they zoom in on comments and posts that look interesting.

Robert Scoble embraces thisas both inevitable and perhaps even an improvement:

Anyway, I am seeing this trend big time. Over on FriendFeed I’m seeing better comments than I see on most blogs (and more quantity too).

The era when bloggers could control where the discussion of their stuff took place is totally over.

This is a trend that the best bloggers should embrace. Me? I follow wherever the conversation takes me.

Eric Berlin suggests that Twitter is the new RSS reader:

For me, Twitter has of late become a faster and easier and more accessible way to let the news “come to me.” Churning through endless RSS feeds – spools of new product announcements from the likes of TechCrunch and Mashable, for instance – can at times be a chore, leeching away the excitement of discovery that leads me (and you) to hit the interwebs in the first place seeking out new treasure chests in the first place.

The 'information finds me, instead of me having to find it' is one of the best ways to characterize flow apps, as a whole, like Twitter, the Facebook mini-feed, and Workstreamr.

Tony Hung seems to stumble over his feet a bit, in his condemnation of RSS services (like Shyftr) that copy blog posts in their entirety, and suggests they have crossed a line. When he mentions copyright issue, he really hasn't thought it through. For example, at /Message, I have an explicit policy of Creative Commons licensing (with attribution, no derivatives, non-commercial use only). So, I am explicitly giving rights to others. In the absence of explicit agreements like creative commons, standard copyright is in place, which limits what someone can do with our art.

But that is really an aside to Louis Gray's commentary.

I am perfectly happy to let people 'scrape' my writings, and paper the wall of some RSS reader with it. Isn't that inevitable? You could block that by simply disabling your RSS feeds, but readers would be pissed.

And it is likewise inevitable that people will create links to blog posts, and comment on them, and that this discussion could be anywhere.

And increasingly the conversation will be taking place elsewhere: not in the blog, but in the flow.

Behind this commotion is the issue of pageviews and ad revenue, since people having a discussion in Twitter is arguably good for Twitter and the participants, but it doesn't make any money -- directly -- for the author, since people aren't looking at the ads on his blog. That's the real rub, and something that suggests headaches for bloggers and business opportunities for tool vendors.

Comments

[Sylvain Carle]

"And increasingly the conversation will be taking place elsewhere: not in the blog, but in the flow."

And that is exactly an advantage to the "because" crew.

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2007/11/28/adventures-with-because-effects/

So everyone that have the blog as the end and not the mean will try to resist this trend and kick and scream how it's wrong.

But anyone going with the conversation flow (as you say) will benefit with the "atomization" of the conversation.

I am quite sure "because" trumps "with" in a medium where distribution is better than control of reproduction, it's all about atom, not bits. Long tail, etc...

Great analysis Stowe, as usual.

[Louis Gray]

One of the major pieces I wanted to get across was that we, as bloggers, should be aware of all the different places the conversation has moved, and we should engage. If we do not engage there, we will be missing opportunities to find new peers, to expose ourselves to those communities, and we could be left behind by the more nimble participants. We need to not resist this move of the conversation in the way we should not resist the move away from page views and raw visitor counts in favor of RSS subscribers or any other new metric of the month.

[Stowe Boyd]

Louis -

We never really were able to do that anyway, as many times people would cite our work, clip huge chunks of it, and not even link back! But even if they do link back, its ofetn just impossible to visit everywhere we are cited and 'engage'. There has never really been a coherent conversational mechanism on the blogosphere.

I am not proposing a new metric, but I believe a new perspective around comments: they have run off to the flow in Twitter, Friendfeed, and who knows where else. We are going to have to persist in a messy, inchoate state until a new stasis is reached, which might take five years, or more.