So I get this question from my friend: 'Brij, what's up with blogging slogging?'
This friend got hit by news will find you trap and found this I-quit-blogging announcement by Jason Calacanis unnerving.
There have been rumblings of sorts on where this whole blogging slogging is going. Today also on Techmeme I saw two posts analyzing this same topic from two different, and apparently honest, angles. David Risley rightly thinks we are in a change phase and little bit of 'community humility' will go a long way in bringing back the fun:
Yes, it is changing. A super saturated niche like tech blogging is evolving into a conversation that takes place as much on social media like FriendFeed and Twitter as it does on the blog. Not all blogging niches are like that, but tech is particularly saturated as a niche. The guys who end up being leaders in today’s tech blogging are the people who offer real value on all of their communication lines (blog + social media outlets) and who are personable and actively interact with others. Any tech blogger who is looking at it as a competition or who worry incessantly about the so-called "a-list" is just not going to do really well.
If you can’t change with the community, then I guess it might be easier to bow out and start blogging about something else.
Loren Feldman has a very revealing take on overall technology world. Emperor has no clothes but he is more right than lot of people out there.
Now my answer to my friend was rather boring. I told him blogging phenomena is evolutionary, some A-listers now need to work on their family, some are just burned out, adsense economy is a welfare economy and you can't pay your bill with it etc etc.
Short answer was that people will continue to need car (blog), they may or may not like going for Hummer or Porsche (star blogs).
Though I wasn't very pleased with my answer, felt I should have been deep and used some difficult to understand words! Later on I managed to dig up this conversation between Bart Simpson and his high-IQ sister Lisa. I think this conversation captures the dilemma faced by these rebellious blogger Barts.
I have taken liberty with emphasis and link. Enjoy -
BART: Lis, everyone in town is acting like me. So why does it suck?
LISA: It's simple, Bart: you've been defined yourself as a rebel, and in the absence of a repressive milieu your societal nature's been co-opted.
BART: I see.
LISA: Ever since that self-help guy came to town, you've lost your identity. You've fallen through the cracks of our quick-fix, one-hour photo, instant oatmeal society.
BART: What's the answer?
LISA: Well, this is your chance to develop a new and better identity. May I suggest .. good natured doormat?'
BART: Sounds good, sis. Just tell me what to do.
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Blogging is time consuming. Folks who have interesting things to say are super busy. It's good to see more innovation in making blog posting more efficient and time saving. I have talked about in the past why blogging tools have to evolve to make blog posting simple and distributed. In order to make blogging simple we added Reblogging feature for Google Reader users, added multiple email support so you can really push complex blog posts from any location,
There are many more ways to think about making post task easy. Today Zemanta introduced very interesting features in this category. I really like link discovery and image gallery. This validates the point that current blogging tools are not optimized for busy professionals. Increasingly everybody will feel the need for this kind of tool. Good work Zemanta.
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First I thought I will put picture from Roland Joffe's classic The Killing Fields. I realized that will be offending to some people so I thought why not just emphasize what is burning in my eyes. I mean burning when I scan Techmeme from top to bottom.
Few disclaimers to start with. I have big respect for all these bloggers and journalists. They do fine job in enjoying themselves and in that process educating the great unwashed long tail. So by highlighting few words here and there I am not passing any judgment here. If you want to fault me for any thing then probably it should be my lame attempt in being funny.
To me the combination of three separate Techmeme headline with somewhat linked verbal symbolism did it.
First the BBC news piece. Jakob Nielsen shared his research study where he found online users are getting way more antsy. Most website designers are naturally unaware of this and expect users to like their shiny gradient layout.
Users are setting expectation level from the best. Google search engine's sub-second response time is a big subliminal play. Every other website gets dissed because they are not as fast as Google. At least not as good in instant gratification as Google is. Gratification level offered by Google search engine is a new default happiness level. Every other website has to offer superior or alternate instant gratification in order to suck less. Consistently fail in doing that and you invite WTF, F#$K OFF, SOB, and what not. I have faced it in couple of occasion, when MessageDance site was struggling to get IE support (we still suck on IE6 but we don't feel too bad about it).
Anger and frustration around wildly popular Twitter is a case study of it's own kind. I will not comment much on that. You can read Techmeme headline to get the idea. I had issues with people using "kill" or "killing" in headline but I guess that works well to raise passions couple of notches (not to say that it doesn't help page views!).
Last news item just happened to be there below Twitter cluster. Tim O Reilly's analysis is, as always, spot on. It's just that his choice of words (along with two other headlines) made for a strange eew!
Otherwise weekend is coming along just fine. Weather be damned.
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It’s a common complaint that if blogging was easier to do there will be more people doing it. Blog setup, blog posting, formatting, proof reading and post-post comment supervision, list of stuff to manage goes on and on. All that adds up to big drain on time. Its a hassle because it takes time. If we cut down time then we invite more people to do blogging.
One of my frustration is to see people who should be blogging not doing it because its still a hassle for them. These are people with great ideas and great projects. Question is what should we do to make these smart but time-challenged people get into the game. More time sharing great insights and less time gardening your blog.
We have been focusing a lot on these kind of people. Smart, time-challenged and not wiling to put up with lot of hassles. MessageDance email-based blog publishing model helps in that regard. Now email-to-blog model has been there for some time but it was implemented in a very kludgey way. Wasn’t optimized for mobile experience. You had to remember long email string and also had to keep it super secret. Remember the frustration when you want to blog some picture you saw on Flickr or video on YouTube. You are not going to remember that long email address at that time. Simple handle like blogs@messagedance.com solves that recall problem.
Best part of this approach is that it totally respects your current choice of tools - email, wordpress or blogger, or iPhone. Consider this announcement . Google News now supports iPhone. Now you can with just couple of iPhone clicks, link blog news article of your choice. Ease of publishing is extra-ordinary. MessageDance takes that link blog post one step further by showing snapshot in your blog and also leaving a twitter status update. Small bonus of “Reply on Twitter” comes with each link blog post. Give it a shot. You would be surprised with the ease of use.
I wish there was more innovation in the blog publishing tools category. Today Blogger rolled out future time stamped blog posts . For busy professionals, time to write blog is a real calendar challenge and now with this feature they can dump all their thoughtstream in one impulse phase and schedule the release. Thank you Blogger. I am sure wonderful team over at Wordpress will take this idea one step further.
