Paul Boutin’s Wired article “Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004″ last year created a lively dialog about the future of blogging. The general gist of the article (in case you haven’t read it) is that mainstream media companies have adopted and started to dominate the blog format while independent bloggers have drifted into the even more casual and spontaneous domain of “status updates.”
Independent bloggers do tend to let their productivity ebb and flow and I am sure that many of the “citizen journalists” who were really flowing during the blogging peak are seriously ebbing right now. I agree with Boutin that blogging is no longer the primary way that people casually share ideas. Now, when I run across some interesting information I have three choices. I can blog it, I can bookmark it, or I can tweet it. My general rule of thumb is: when I have something to add, I blog it; when I just want to save it for later (perhaps with a little note), I bookmark it in Delicious (or star it in Google Reader); when I just want to tell my friends, I tweet it. All of my stuff goes into FriendFeed where occasionally people comment and add their own ideas. I imagine other bloggers’ productivity is similarly diluted across these other channels.
But Boutin’s trend is going even further. There was a great article in the New York Times that described how television journalists are getting addicted to Twitter. Robert Scoble has created his own format on FriendFeed where he starts an item with something like “Why Twitter is not for conversations. I will give you five reasons here:” and then goes on to list them in the comments. As he adds items, everyone else chimes in with their opinions. The result is a Crossfire-like discussion but without the interruptions (and, thankfully, without Tucker Carlson). In this case, he gave 5 reasons out of a total of 158 comments and another 143 people “liked” the post. In these cases the journalist moves from commentator to facilitator or catalyst. But, while this format is very dynamic and has lots of energy, it lacks the authority of a single person summarizing and interpreting the information.
To really develop an idea into a cohesive viewpoint, you may not need to write a 1,400 word exposé but you do need more than 140 characters (FriendFeed allows you more but most people don’t use more than 140). And for that type of communication the blog format is very well suited because you have the room to elaborate on your point and you still offer a place for others to make their own comments. Blogging is not going away. If anything, it is displacing the formal article as the preferred format for journalists who appreciate the more intimate relationship with their reading audience that comes with immediate publishing and user submitted comments. My feed reader relentlessly fills up with new content every day so I can’t complain about not having enough to read. If anything, I feel like the overall quality of the blogosphere is going up. Blogging isn’t dying, it is just maturing. And with maturity, comes sophistication (at least that is what I tell myself).
Blogs, Wiki’s, etc.
Monday, November 10th, 2008A couple of months ago a WCMS sales guy said to me that when hears the words “we are looking for blogs, wikis, etc.” from a customer it is a clear indication that the customer really doesn’t know what he is talking about or (at least) doesn’t have a clear vision of goals for Web 2.0.
I too am suspicious (and a little surprised) when I hear these terms together because, other than the fact that they are relatively new to the “enterprise,” blogs and wikis have little to do with each other. Bob Doyle wrote a very good article differentiating these technologies way back in 2006 (When to Wiki, When to Blog – read the article).
A blog is a publishing system and a wiki is a collaboration tool. A blog author writes articles (posts) which reflect an idea or an observation at a point of time. You don’t typically update a blog entry unless you see a typo that annoys too much to ignore (like misspelling your name – as on of my recent posts). Comments provide a forum for a dialog around the topic. These comments may appear within the context of the blog site or somewhere else as in the case of friendfeed but they are a conversation around the article, not the article itself. Occasionally the blog author will highlight a comment by updating the blog with a reference but this is the exception not the rule. If the author changes his mind, he will write another post rather than update the original. To learn from blogs you read lots of posts and piece together a consistent understanding that works for you.
A wiki is a tool to collaboratively build a comprehensive informational resource. Rather than blog posts that a single author publishes to an audience, a wiki page allows a group of people to jointly define a topic, establish a policy, or create some other information resource that needs to be updated over time. Companies that use a wiki (rather than a WCMS) as their intranet have come to the conclusion that potentially anyone in the company could correct or otherwise improve the information there. If these contributions are wrong, their updates can be corrected or rolled back.
WCMS can serve both of these publishing and information management purposes. For example, a typical implementation “corporate brochure” of a CMS will publish “point-in-time” articles (e.g. press releases) and manage fixed pages (e.g. “about us”). If you need to do both with one tool (and want the option to strictly control contribution), you probably need a WCMS. If you need to do one of these things but not the other, you might be in the market for a blog or a wiki but not “blogs, wikis, etc.”
Posted in Web2.0, collaboration, commentary | 1 Comment »