Fred Wilson on Leaving The Instigator Out: Small Worlds v Big World

Fred Wilson creates a cascade by stating a seemingly simple question: if the conversation is migrating off the blog comment space, then authors of the initial 'content' loses the feedback that might be considered their due as authors. Note: this is a post where most of the action is in the comments.

My brother, known as Jackson to the blog world, wrote a wonderful post on the rock band Mott The Hoople last week. I saw it today and posted it to delicious. Which resulted in it showing up in my FriendFeed.

And the good news is that a bunch of people saw that post that would have never seen it otherwise. A few went to Blogger and left a comment for Jackson. And a bunch left comments on FriendFeed that Jackson will never see and never reply to. And he also won't see Robert's compliment which I know he'd appreciate.

So here's the deal. Jackson instigated the conversation with that post. His reward is the comments it generates. That's how bloggers get paid. And he's not getting his due on this one.

It's sort of my fault because I posted it to delicious and got the conversation going elsewhere. It's also sort of the fault of the people who left comments on FriendFeed and not Jackson's blog.

Seems a simple statement of the problem. But there is a conundrum that isn't directly addressed.

The web is not flat and unitary. It is a collection of small, lumpy and partially closed worlds that mutually define and exclude each other, just as much as models like publishing posts and storing and publishing comments on those posts ('embedded comments') seem to offer the illusion of a flat and spaciously open web.

The various actions in his simple recitation are actually complex.

Jackson wrote the post and associated it with his blog, which is based around the now traditional blog publishing model. The implication is that since the blog supports embedded comments, then anyone wanting to comment on Jackson's post owes it to him to create comments there, or, at the least, to write the comment in some form that supports trackback. Or not at all. In this way, Jackson's post can become the nexus of the conversation about the post, and if it is popular, he becomes the recipient of the popularity: as in page rank, technorati ranking, increased reader subscriptions, and ultimately, the possibility of better ad revenue, if that's in the picture.

It's really a Web 1.0 publishing model, where the authors (or their business) 'owns' the initial 'content' and they have rights to the benefits. The benefits include 'ownership' of the comments, which should be captured and published in the same blogging tool, or at the least, in such a way so that the authors can manipulate the commentary in a way that is advantageous to the authors. For example, the authors get to moderate, edit, or block comments based on their sole say-so.

But the no-no of non-attribution seems to be institutionalized by the explosive growth of the flow-based social tools, that have spun willy-nilly out of a bizarre extension of solitary reading into social sharing and commentary.

It's a small step from 'Hmmm, I am reading this interesting post from this guy Jackson. I will bookmark it to be able to pull it up later.' to 'Hmmm, I am reading this interesting post from this guy Jackson. I will share it with those that are following me in [fill in the blank flowish application, like del.icio.us, Facebook, Twitter, Google reader, Friendfeed or whatever]'. And then, 'Hey, what do you guys think about this guy Jackson's post?' and a cascade with my pals on that topic, potentially not involving Jackson at all.

The fact that the tools make it possible to create thousands of small worlds -- like 'those following Stowe on Twitter' -- is wonderful, and enriching. But the multiplicity of small worlds fragments the ethics of the earlier blog publishing model into a hundred thousand tiny pieces.

Fred and others in the comment discussion touch on many perspectives, but I think they share a naivete about the difference between the concept of a flat and unitary web and the realities of a discontinuous and partially closed web. The small worlds is like human scale, while the flat and unitary model is the sort of web that traditional media people would want.

And it isn't just an issue of 'who owns the comments' although that plays here. If Jackson publishes a post on Mott The Hoople, and I post 'Yikes! Mott The Hoople? http://www.url.io/3jk8a' on Twitter so that my 3300+ followers see it, from one perspective I am helping him (he could get clickthroughs!) while from another I am penalizing him (no comment or trackback on his post). But from the perspective of my relationship with the 3300+ following me, I am keeping my small world agreement to provide them with a flow of interesting stuff. And I maintain that small world ethics will trump big world ethics everytime.

Fred goes on to suggest that the answer is that all the flow apps should ping each other and the publishing tools too, so that every post and every conversation everywhere can be cross threaded. This is big world thinking: where small worlds start to appear, beat down the walls and flatten everything. What we will likely see is a small world mishmash, where some people instrument blogs with Sphere-like search to find commentary elsewhere, and others don't. Where some people fall into Friendfeed and others are content to share links in delicious. A spectrum of small worlds, with different but occasionally overlapping denizens. A mess, in other words.

Luckily, not only is the 'everyone send messages to everyone' course uninteresting to the individual people involved, who naturally will gravitate to small world models where human scale comes into effect, but it is also impractical on a performance basis. The potential explosion of messaging -- every post and conversation in every service or blog platform times every conversational flow app or blogging platform -- would choke the web.

We are already suffering from the bleed over of commentary in one small world showing up without context in others: have you tried to make sense of the twittered Friendfeed comments, where the thread is lost?

It may seem negative to say it, but we need less crossover in these activities. Spuriously updating your Facebook, Jaiku and Pownce status from your Twitter account may seem like a way to bridge the many sides of your online persona, but unless you are actively participating in the various environments in their own unique way, you aren't really fooling anyone, or getting any value either.

The Scobles of the world, with 20K+ followers in all small worlds, have transcended individual involvement and become media institutions. We can't look to them for guidance or sensible models of individual conduct.

But what is likely, is people living at human scale will perceive that conversation is a shared property of small worlds comprised of their inhabitants. It's indigenous content: by us, for us. And it's only meaningful in that context.

To the extent that blogs have created small worlds of their communities, they have that property and that has value. Increasingly, the pull of non-blog small worlds -- the benefits of remaining connected in flow apps -- is too strong, and the conversation will continue to walk away from the blog posts that seem to trigger them. And the nature of social scale means that the value is tied to smallness, while the publisher mindset wants bigness. As we move to the edge, everything gets small, and those holding to the center want to keep things big.

Comments

[fred wilson]

stowe

i am not sure i understand. if this is true:

>It may seem negative to say it, but we need less crossover in these activities. >Spuriously updating your Facebook, Jaiku and Pownce status from your Twitter account >may seem like a way to bridge the many sides of your online persona, but unless you are >actively participating in the various environments in their own unique way, you aren't >really fooling anyone, or getting any value either.

then should i stop sending all my stuff to friendfeed since i don't participate in that service?

fred

[Judi Sohn]

Outstanding analysis of issues that I've been turning over in my head a lot the last few days. In fact, my first instinct was to share this post on FriendFeed and kind of leave it at that. But then I thought, no...I "owe" it to Steve to comment here. :-)

I agree with almost everything you say, but I disagree in your ultimate conclusion (I think) that this is all for the greater good. At some point, in some way, the conversation has to get big again or it will go nowhere. Why do have meetings and organizations to begin with? Because at some point, we need to bring a lot of opinions together to consensus for organized action.

I don't necessarily think that all comments should be reflected at the original source, but tools like FriendFeed have to cater to more than the Robert Scobles and Michael Arringtons. They have to think from the beginning on what the content provider needs and deserves from the relationship and they should have considered some sort of ping pack tool to the original content right from the start. Or at least better search and filtering.

I have Google Alerts set up for important keywords related to my organization so while I can't control the conversation around our issues, I can at least easily monitor that they're happening. FriendFeed needs the mechanism for similar aggregation. Then it's my choice whether or not to utilize them. Right now, it's all a blur and the small content provider doesn't stand a chance.

So yeah, let's keep the conversations small but let's make sure we have the tools in place to bring them all together when we have to so it's not only the big voices having the chance for the big conversations.

[Ric]

I agree that the conversation can't and shouldn't necessarily be controlled by the instigator, but I think part of Fred's problem with this is that there is potentially interesting/important conversation happening that was instigated by someone that they will miss out on. For myself, I don't mind WHERE the conversation takes place, but given my obvious interest (if it's my post originating the discussion, it's probably interesting to me) I would like to know what other people have to say about it.

That said, Fred's suggestion is possibly not the best approach; can we come up with something better?

[Bill Tozier]

The same sort of conservation-of-effort applies to face-to-face communications, too. Colleagues and friends, local to me here in town, ebb and flow in their online coordination and conversations over time. But as Twitter has become a coordinating tool among us in planning our days, the local focus of our tweets has made it less useful for our remote followers. This eventually has segregated a diverse crowd into those who see each other almost daily, and those who meet rarely and consider the disjoint Twitter chatter random noise. As small groups meet regularly, they tend to shed peripheral members who can't keep pace with the shifting context of the tightly knit core.

We all still seem to value face-to-face conversation highest, though, no matter what naysayers might imagine. There's a pecking order in communication. Please post an entry/article describing everything that happened at the meeting the other night is not the sort of request that fosters warm feelings to those who attended, especially if the meeting was exciting, interesting, and densely textured. Maintaining that remote link becomes a burden when there is an easier channel--sitting and talking--in competition.

Otherwise, we become documentarians, minute-takers for one another.

So. Shall I now post an edited version of this comment on my blog, which some perceive as languishing and "falling silent"? Should I transcribe these thoughts across the "border" from comment to post? Or should I just del.icio.us the comment itself?

Hard to say, since I'm late for a meeting. The fact that I came here via Twitter, though, seems salient. The fact that I subscribed to Fred's blog RSS feed a while back, and had already seen the post you mention, also does. Somehow.

[Stowe Boyd]

Fred - It's ok if others what to pull your stuff into FF to comment on it, but if you aren't going there to participate, you are just 'publishing' not communing in a community.

[kleevr]

Reading this post reminded me of a blog where the author stated in the opening paragraph that the discussion thread would be on on hacker news and the auther provided a link to the thread. Wasn't able to find a reference link in my history thought-- sorry.