More on the Blogosphere’s Diluted Conversation
Yesterday, I wrote an article on Read Write Web entitled "The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere" about all the various ways the new lifestreaming and aggregating services have moved the conversation off of blogs and onto FriendFeeds and Twitter and the like. (Follow the conversation here on Techmeme. The post was inspired by Jason Kaneshiro’s post on The Blog Herald.) I’m really interested in the conversation that has developed around this topic. Larry Dignan on ZDNet asked "Do You Have to Be in Every Conversation?" But it’s Allen Stern who notes that the bigger issue is that readers of his articles miss the discussion. He then points out that there’s a business idea here, saying:
"What’s needed is a way to centralize the conversation back on the original content source while still allowing users to get involved on the platform they choose."
However, Mark Krynsky, thinks that
"People are losing interest in commenting on blog posts. This dialog is usually limited to the vacuum that is just the author and other commenters. Twitter and FriendFeed offers us the intimacy of sharing ourselves and our data with our immediate circle of friends."
If FriendFeed and the like are inspiring conversations because they are more intimate conversations between friends (which very well may be the case) then blogs, formerly the locale of these conversations, have failed.
What killed the blogs, then? I think it was spam. Well, not the spam itself, but the tools blogs used to fight it: the comment forms you had to fill out providing an email address, the CAPTCHAs, the authentication methods, the comment moderation, etc. - that’s what did the blogs in. The immediacy of the conversation was killed.
This is where FriendFeed came in and solved the problem. One click and you’ve commented. Simple, basic, easy, immediate. Plus you could comment on everything, not just links, but tweets, songs, anything. And the ingenious "Like" feature is the perfect digg-like tool that lets you opine without writing a word. Blogs, meanwhile, suffer with no comments. New readers do lose out because they’ll never know what other people really thought of the topic…and yes, Vlad, that matters.
I hope some developers see the eagerness people have for a tool that centralizes our conversations, be them on Twitter, Digg, FriendFeed, RSSMeme, etc. and lets us follow them and mash ‘em up and stick them back into our blogs. Don’t just give us our lifestream, let us USE IT.
And listen up: I want an all-in-one tool. This is where a service like cocomment could stage their comeback (is anyone still using this, I wonder?). Their site claims they will track all your conversations, but I want to track "conversations," not just "my conversations." If I write professionally for RWW and it gets dugg and commented on in the digg comments, I may or may not be joining that discussion, but I sure as heck am interested in following that conversation. Where’s the tool that does that?
And FriendFeed, start creating some solutions here. I mean, look how excited people were to discover a way to filter your FriendFeed services via Greasemonkey, something I just discovered on Corvida’s site. What kills me about this is that the creator of the script comments on her post that
"The script isn’t doing anything that smart… all I’m doing is using features on friendfeed that are kinda hidden."
Wait - What? Features? Where? I don’t see these features anywhere. I hope the FriendFeed dev team is listening because that should be built into the product. A Wordpress plugin that integrated the FriendFeed conversation around your blog post with your Wordpress blog would be nice too.
Follow the conversation at YackTrack!
I don’t think there will be a time when everybody agrees. FriendFeed has stated they intend to keep some fragmentation to conversations, but there may be improvements going forward that tie the diversity together. As I noted on FriendFeed in response to Allen’s article:
http://friendfeed.com/e/b82c0b.....7d3d41fcad
‘ I don’t think we’ll get a unified opinion on unifying comments. Some like having conversations on FriendFeed rather than on the original source. Others, mainly the content producers, want the conversation on their site. But while Allen says, “No reader is going to hit up all of the services listed above to try to track and join the conversation”, I say, “No reader is going to go to all the individual blogs to make comments.” ‘
They should at least give the option or some kind of opt-out/in.
Nevertheless, FriendFeed’s intimacy is fantastic. It’s wonderful, but I think it’s making some of us lazy to the point where we won’t comment on the blog. I’m writing a post to contribute my thoughts surrounding conversation fragmentation. I think the authors should be given more credit though and I think we as bloggers have a responsibility to make sure they get the proper credit that we would want in return.
I can’t wait to read your post, sounds interesting!
Sarah,
I don’t know, I kind of feel like the proof is in the pudding. I found out about your original story by following your blog. I put up a blog post and I linked back to your blog (ie, you) and your story (ie, your point). I found out about your response, ie, trackback.
I am not sure what the incrimental value of 2nd or 3rd degree conversation is. The expense of seeking it out through a third party service, to me, makes it next to worthless. If your opinion was so valuable, would you not want it seen by the highest likely interested audience that is reading it at its source and considering it at the same time?
-Vlad
Another point to consider — what does this do for the content creators?
If the traffic on the original posters side is down, commenting is down, visits (and) clickthroughs are down, does that reduce the commercial appeal of bloging and thereby reduce the audience? Or is the bet on the long tail of things, that eventually others will find out about blogs they wouldn’t have found out about without the comment by the third party?
-Vlad
(not reduce the audience — I meant to say “does it not reduce the commercial appeal of blogging and the frequency/quality of posts” and just proliferates brainless 140 character rants?
-Vlad
Sarah,
From what we see in our traffic, yes, definitely, some people are still using coComment
I would even say that we do get more and more users/conversations everyday.
When we say “Track your conversation”, this does not mean that you are actually commenting: you can just click on track and this conversation will be added to your list and you will be notified when a new comment is added.
Hope that helps.
@Vlad - very interesting points to consider there…hmmmm