ON BLOGS STUCK IN A RUT (PART 2)

CREATIVE DESTRUCTION

Jeff Jarvis encapsulates what I was trying to say in my "Blogs Stuck in a Rut" (now Part 1) post with far greater punch, clarity and coherence.  In a post titled "Time to Blow up Blogs", he states the core of the problem:

"Blogs have already become prisoners of their format. Time to light some dynamite."

There's a ton of great feedback both to his post and mine, suggesting a number of tools and services that can be used to create blogs with far more flexibility than the plain vanilla templates offered by most of the mainstream engines. 

But both of us, I believe, are asking for the more complex, rich offerings in easy-to-use templates available to mainstream audiences WITHOUT availing themselves of either self-taught, family-based, or sub-contracted technical help.

Scott Chaffin has a number of good comments and questions to Jeff's post that  I feel compelled to answer directly.

First, he answers Jeff's question (stated inbold italics below):

"Anybody want to design Michael his template? 

Sure.  How much is he willing to pay?  As an investment banker, he should be able to pony up a fair chunk of change.

See, here’s the deal.  Most bloggers don’t care about all that hoo-ha.  Because it’s fluffy eye-candy."

Addressing Scott's first point:  it's not about a single individual like me  sub-contracting a fancy site with the special features I want.  The thrust of my post was that if this were a standard and easy option in the mainstream platforms, without greater technical skills required, then a lot of mainstream folks could express themselves in a format that didn't call for a specific form.  Thus the nature, and as a result, the quality of expression changes.  And it's far more than just being "eye-candy".

Most people come into blogging emulating what they see being done by others.  And if 99% of the blogs out there are in the same cookie-cutter format, well, that's what the newbies will implement.  Over time, if they get really into it, they may go through the extra investment of personal time, effort and money to add more customized bells and whistles, but the majority will keep doing what they've been doing... at least until the tools evolve.

Next, Scott comments:

"With RSS, there is no need for me to mess with the sizzle if I don’t want it. If you want to add it, by all means, go ahead…it’s your site."

Now here, Scott puts himself in the same company as folks like Scoble and countless others who read most of their  blogs in a feed reader of some sort. 

Personally, even though I use Bloglines to follow almost 1,500 feeds, I tend to want to go the main sites of most of my favorite sites FROM the feed-reader.  And that's because I don't want to miss the nuances of expression contained in the design of the site. 

As an aside it's said that over 80% of communication with another person is from non-verbal cues.  In a similar vein, from me anyway, a good chunk of the content of a blog is from non-textual cues.  And that's no exaggeration.  I guess I prefer my core blogs in their "organic" state, without the "processing of a feed reader, despite the greater efficiency of those tools.

Over time, I'm sure there will be versions of RSS feeds and feed readers that preserve the original presentation of individual blogs (perhaps in Ajaxified windows).  It's a personal preference, I know, and over time feed readers will likely accommodate the need to pass on the "organic" essence of all blogs.

Third, Scott states in yet another comment to Jeff Jarvis's original post, responding to a comment by Bob Weston to Jeff's original post (stated in bold italics again):

"it’s time to give a clue to the people driving the development of the top blogging tools.

And I’ll say it again — what’s their payback for the investment? They give the software away for free. Are you ready and willing to pay for it?'

And my answer would be that if the mainstream blog services felt that they did need to recoup their investment with additional fees, I think that people would pay for it. 

For example, Typepad only has three of tiers to their subscription services ($5, $9, and $15/month.  I would think there'd be a market for a fourth tier at UP TO say, $25/month, for a blog with a substantially richer set of features.  I pick $25/month (or $300/year) somewhat arbitrarily as the upper limit on the assumption, that one would have to pay around $300 or so for sub-contracted technical help to set up a really fancy blog with all the bells and whistles described in the above posts.

On the other hand, some of the things we're talking about are relatively modest software tweaks.  And if they encourage a greater number of mainstream folks who have not tried blogging to do so because they can express themselves with far greater flexibility, then that benefits the blogging platform. 

Remember, the estimates say that there are roughly 27 million blogs out there today.  Compare that with over 50 million MySpace users, who have a lot more flexibility in setting up their rich-media content than a typical blog.

Ultimately the game is about bringing in the highest number of mainstream users and converting them from readers to commenters to bloggers.

Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo! had a terrific post titled "Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers" on his new blog yesterday with the adjacent illustration (click for larger image).  And he made the following point:

"The levels in the pyramid represent phases of value creation.  As an example take Yahoo! Groups.

• 1% of the user population might start a group (or a thread within a group)
• 10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress
• 100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups (lurkers)"

If you changed "Creators, Synthesizers and Consumers" to "Bloggers, Commenters and Readers", I daresay you'd have roughly the same percentages in the blogging universe.

So with more flexible templates, if mainstream blogging services could encourage, say 10% of the Commenters to become bloggers (say folks like Christopher Coulter), and 10% more of the readers into Commenters, you'd be accelerating this whole blogging thing faster into the mainstream.  This despite speculation of blogging's imminent demise (see this Slate piece), at least in this cycle.

For as Dave Winer eloquently responds to that piece:

"To say blogging is dead is as ridiculous as saying email or IM or the telephone are dead."

We just need to get blogging to become as mainstream is email, IM  or the telephone.  And that probably means blowing up blogs as we know it today.

Comments

[Dimitar Vesselinovd]

Derrick Oien:
"I was talking to Peter today about some cool marketing stuff he is working on. The topic of influencers came up and I told him that I am not interested in the blogging intelligentsia or the web 2.0 crowd in general as I feel that many (not all) of them ignore the youth market. I told him that case in point to me was that Dave Winer, the inventor of RSS, ignored the rollout of MySpace's implementation of RSS and Podcasting. I told Peter that it was funny to me that this post I wrote is the number one search result for Google for the words Myspace and Podcasting and that the 'blogosphere' said nothing about the fact that 45 million people now see RSS and podcasting on their number one addiction. Hey Dave, What's the deal? THIS IS HUGE. This is way more important than the gazzillion web 2.0 companies that rollout RSS and other stuff that have ZERO customers."
http://doien.blogspot.com/2006/02/blogger-intelligentsia-ignores-youth.html

[Scott Chaffin]

Interesting follow-up. I'll likely post a response at my own place.

[Lopanda]

Very nice design ;) Good work,webmaster!