Can Co-Owned Comments Improve Online Conversations?

Duncan Riley is promulgating ‘Blogging 2.0’ to represent what I consider the erosion of social media by their historic communities under the inexorable rise of flow applications, like Twitter, Friendfeed, Socialmedian, and Feedly (to name only a few).

I think his description of what is happening is overly simplistic, and the appropriation of the term ‘Blogging 2.0’ is a jingoistic attempt to leverage the “paradigm shift” magic of the 2.0 suffix.

In a recent post, Riley lays it out.

[from The Changing Blogosphere and Blogging 2.0 by Duncan Riley]

Blogs as a destination for content became focused on pageviews, most often linked to driving advertising, and profit. Blogging as a unselfish act of sharing turned into a self-focused milk every pageview play, with a strong focus on search engine traffic. If in 2003 I had accurately written about what blogs would be like in 2008, I would have been laughed at, the shift in 5 years has been that dramatic.

Blogging 2.0 runs counter to the prevailing ethos in blogging, which is maximize your Google juice, your page views, your links in, and refrain from sharing that traffic with others, without putting the end user first. Blogging 1.0 is all about maximizing the opportunities for the blog owner while ignoring community, where as blogging 2.0 maximizes the experience for the end user (reader).

In focusing on the experience for the end user, via linking, sharing and enabling the conversation across many places, blogging 2.0 rallies against today’s accepted norms.

I agree with some of the broad brush strokes, but not the schema he is using for the paint-by-the-numbers conclusion.

First, while it is true that many traffic hungry would-be-Techcrunches have focused on search optimization techniques and gaming Techmeme to become more well-known, on the whole that has not been the case in the blogosphere. The great majority of bloggers haven’t gone down that path, but seismic changes have been taking place, anyway; therefore, those changes are not really attributable to the actions of B-list wannabes, or even A-list media moguls in the making.

The original ethos of the blogosphere wasn’t about ‘ignoring community’: on the contrary, it was focused on supporting community, principally through the interaction on blog comments and, later on, through trackbacks. I started blogging in 1999, and that has been the face of blogging until quite recently, when RSS and then flow applications — Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, etc. — began to strip mine the myriad communities within the comment space.

The original ethos of the blogosphere wasn’t about ‘ignoring community’: on the contrary, it was focused on supporting community, principally through the interaction on blog comments and, later on, through trackbacks. I started blogging in 1999, and that has been the face of blogging until quite recently, when RSS and then flow applications — Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, etc. — began to strip mine the myriad communities within the comment space.

I am not sure that this represents a shift in focus to the ‘end user’ as Riley asserts. In fact, I am opposed to characterizing the roles of people in the blogging dynamic as ‘end users’ or ‘consumers’, which seems to me to be an aspect of the mass media mindset.

What has happened is that the communities are being fragmented and pulled out of the blogs. The community of participants here, at /Message, for example, has increased considerably over time — /Message stats indicate a growth of over 2100% in the past 12 months — but comments haven’t increased at anything like the same rate… at least not here.

What has happened is that Twitter users are commenting there, or Friendfeed users in FRiendfeed, or users of Feedly inside of Feedly. And — excluding a few bridges that have been built — generally these communities are operating independently.

So, larger numbers of blog refugees exist, who read blogs in RSS tools or are alerted to interesting stories and conversations in these flow apps, and comment there, into a minority of what once was the greater community of participants.

The blog authors have no means to pull all the threads back together, and even if they did, there is no certainty that the participants would care to cross talk with other fragmented communities. Although I would welcome such tools, if they existed.

The flow fragmentation is starting to resemble the linguistic barriers we have long had on the web, where members of different language groups read and comment on only blogs in their native languages, in general. Except now it is not a segregation based on language, but based on tool selection. It reminds me of the divided world that still exists in instant messaging.

The inexorable transition away from the Web of Pages — which blogging as we know it is part of — to the Web of Flow means that a new model of blogging will evolve to match the new principles of flow-first relationships on the web.

The inexorable transition away from the Web of Pages — which blogging as we know it is part of — to the Web of Flow means that a new model of blogging will evolve to match the new principles of flow-first relationships on the web. Today’s transitional hybrid model creates serious dissonance: blog posts exist statically at a particular URL, while comments are increasingly experienced as a stream within dedicated flow tools.

If we are to have a new generation of blogging it will be something more radical than Riley’s middle ground.

How about a blogging platform that is based on flow, directly? There is an aspect of that in the Tumbler model, where members of the service follow others, and the posts of those Tumblers show up in your Tumbler account as a time-based stream. Tumbler at this time only supports reblogging as annotation or commentary, but I discern a completely new paradigm for blogging lurking within this.

Imagine that I might sign up for a future, flow-based blogging tool. It would, yes, create static pages for blog posts for those stuck in the Web of Pages model, but those that choose to follow me a la Twitter or Tumbler would receive my posts in their own account, or, to extend the model, within any number of third party apps, perhaps as a client on the desktop. Imagine an extended version of Twhirl, for example, where I could receive Tumbler (or any other) generated posts, in between the Tweets. Note that the future Tumbler account might not even support comments, at all: it would be just a tool to generate posts, and to toss them into the flow.

In this model, everything has become disconnected, everything is principally in the flow. The absolute address of any post, or comment, or vote, is irrelevant. And posts and other atrifacts may be copied with appropriate reference back to the original author, and some means to get to a URL, but only as a way to represent an identity.

So each time someone comments on a post, the post (or its first paragraph) would be directly in line with the comments, forming the ‘head’ of the comment thread. Any user could click to have the post expanded in place with embedded images (and ads, perhaps).

Perhaps someone out there besides me realizes that posts, comments, and the other artifacts we are spewing require unique identifiers — like we do, as actors in the Web — and that URLs are filling that role for the moment, but badly.

This Son of Tumbler blogging tool would create a unique identity for each object created, and register it just like we are doing with human identities in OpenID, allowing verification that, yes indeed, Stowe Boyd wrote that post on such a day at such a time with such and such rights allowed to others.

This Son of Tumbler blogging tool would create a unique identity for each object created, and register it just like we are doing with human identities in OpenID, allowing verification that, yes indeed, Stowe Boyd wrote that post on such a day at such a time with such and such rights allowed to others. For example, I might restrict people from reposting unless they paid me, or allow my ads to be displayed; and to explicitly make reference to me. I don’t think we can restrict people from commenting anymore, since the real breakthrough of today’s transitional era has been to take control of the comments out of the hands of the blog authors, and to give it to the commenters themselves.

But as commenting and other microbloggingish activities becomes more and more like blogging, people will want to have the same controls on comments and Tweets that they have traditional expected with posts (and maybe microads?). Soon, they will be first class elements of the next blogosphere, one which is dynamically recomposed by every participant through the agency of next generation Son of Twirl, Twitter, and Tumbler applications.

Anybody working on this? You want some help: contact me.