August 26, 2005
Why is blogging so popular?
Sometimes I wonder why social software has become so popular. We've never seen a phenomenon like blogs before - 16 million blogs tracked by Technorati is undoubtedly an understatement, because of all the dark blogs out there that are hidden away behind firewalls or passwords. There may be millions of blogs that just don't ping Technorati - such as Korean blogs - so are 'invisible' to their indexing spiders. Who knows how many blogs there really are, but it could well be in the hundreds of millions.
Cast your mind back to the beginnings of the World Wide Web, to Netscape Navigator, to the days when a website had to be hand coded and blinking text was all the rage. Back then, the predictions were that soon everyone would have a home page. Everyone would have a presence on the web.
But that didn't happen, because even with the eventual development of WYSIWYG HTML editors, the barrier to entry was still far too high. People didn't know HTML and didn't want to know HTML. It took Blogger to bring that barrier down and make publishing on the web as easy as writing an email.
Five years on from the launch of Blogger and the spread of blogging shows no signs of slowing down. Dave Sifry's State of the Blogosphere posts show that the blogosphere appears to be doubling in size every five to six months.
Yet I'd argue that the technology behind blogging hasn't changed all that much in five years. We've added bells and whistles - comments, trackbacks and tags - but the basics of blogging have remained the same. We are still publishing our thoughts on whatever topic we're passionate about to the world (or just our friends), the same as we were back then.
The success of blogging has nothing really to do with software or technology, but is instead down to the fact that it allows us to interact online in the same way we do offline. With chit chat and cat pictures and discussions of the best recipe for teriyaki salmon, interspersed occasionally with a bit of cooing and billing over the latest gadget/car/mobile phone/knitting pattern. Blogging allows us to get to know people gradually by reading their blog, by leaving comments, by having a blog for them to read, so that communities form unhampered by geography. It allows our personalities to shine through, allows us to be who we are (or who we wish to be).
We have a long and lustrous history of epistolary relationships, from letters between lovers exchanging heartfelt paeans to their devotion, to professorial colleagues discussing the advances they are making in their research. For centuries, the letter has been the key to strengthening weak ties. The phone seems still alien to some of us - that disembodied voice burning our ears - and email is fraught with a lack of emotion that can accidentally engender arguments. But blogs provide what letters once did - persistence, context, presence.
With blogs, we can converse with our friends and with strangers who might one day turn into friends. We can embrace the world and transcend the limits of geography. But most importantly, with blogs we are free to be who we want to be.
Posted by Suw Charman at August 26, 2005 12:58 PM
Comments
Seeing blogs as the postmodern metaphor for handwritten letters, and even ignoring some advances in blogging software betrays a writer's prejudice.
Advances in blogging software include posting photos, videos and podcasts as easily as text. Syndication has also evolved to include various media. Further, posting to and from mobile phones which are a different mechanism carrying a different model of interaction than a pure client/server or PC centric view of communication, represents an innovation in blogging software.
Flickr is an example of blogging software that does not focus on text or writing as the primary conveyence for information and communication. The blogging content of Flickr is photographs, and clever use of photographs to communicate concepts, daily living or even jokes. Flickr is clearly an advance in blogging.
For many, letter writing did give way to phone networks, because the inflection of voice provides more context to communication that the written word. People communicate through different media and are effective at varying degrees depending upon the media and their individual strengths. Podcasting is a antoher example of an advance in blogging. For those who likely preferred speaking over a phone to writing letters, similarly some will choose to express themselves or their cultural behavior via audio recording, rather than text posts.
And then, there's videoblogging. Rocketboom is probably the most notable example of videoblogging. Rocketboom is accessible via a number of networks and devices. It may be consumed via wired networks, wi-fi or even mobile networks as a version of the content has been made available by the producers optimized for a variety of consumption models. A consumer may download Rocketboom via wi-fi for viewing on their PSP. A consumer may access Rocketboom from their mobile phone via WAP. And a consumer might even use a PC browser to view Rocketboom over a wired connection.
Ignoring the trends of blog content evolving to other media and consumption models shouldn't be ignored by advertisers or businesses who wish to tap into the business opportunities available. Videoblogs and podcasts are equally important to text blogs in the conversations occurring and the buzz around products, people and companies.
Further, blogging on mobile phones isn't in the mix for search providers like Technorati (increasingly falling out of favor with bloggers), Feedster, or Blogpulse. The trend toward capturing blog content and consuming blog content on mobile phones is moving beyond its first generation through developments such as: Nokia's LifeBlog; Flickr, Buzznet, Moblog, textamerica; Futurice, et al.; Rabble; Ninja Mobile (acquired by MVNO SK-Earthlink); and WINKsite. For mobile phone consumption there's: Bloglines Mobile; Litefeeds; FeederReader; NextBlast; BeetzStream; and WINKsite.
As past primary content consumption evloved from newspapers to radio and then TeeVee, blogging is also moving from text to podcasting and then video only much much faster.
There is much more to say about the impacts and implications of various media types for social media and it's consumption on mobile phones in particular, but that would require a longer discussion than seems appropriate for a blog comment.
Posted by: mobile jones at August 27, 2005 03:27 AM
What a coincidence that we both remembered the old days of wicked blinking text .. *Yeeks*
However, I must beg to differ on the statement that
The success of blogging has nothing really to do with software or technology
The reason I personally started blogging is really due to ease of publishing online. Especially more so since Blogger.COM has recently came up with Blogger for Word add-on.
In fact, with the multitudes of Technophobes out there, most people I know who don't blog are citing tech-savviness as their prime mental barrier.
I do believe that the "Bells and Whistles" could also have contributed by making blogging a fun thing to do.
Unlike the past, to showcase your pix online will require quite some techiness .. but now with Flickr and such .. It is really a breeze.
I do not think that pure online publishing will draw that crowd, it is really all these auxillary technologies, that synergises the whole entire communication, that will lead the trend.
Anyway .. just a 2 cents worth from a new kid getting on the blog ..
Posted by: Edmund at September 13, 2005 11:08 AM
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at September 21, 2006 06:43 AM
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