Notes on Weblogging Panel at Supernova
We've been at the Supernova conference for the past two days. Today has been fairly weblog-centric with mentions in almost every panel. Meg Hourihan, Dave Winer and Nick Denton presented a talk entitled "Are Weblogs the Next Platform?" Many of the usual questions were addressed:
The Format Question: What makes a weblog a weblog?
The Venture Capitalist Question: What is the monetary value of weblogging?
The Gender Question: Where are all the women? (Thankfully, only mentioned briefly)
What piqued my interest was the discussion about the difference between weblogs and other forms of media (magazines and newspapers) and messaging (ie email, chat, telephone). Nick Denton cites weblogging as an opportunity to enable the MicroPublisher with inexpensive and easy tools. There is also discussion about the power of the weblog permeating traditional media.
Some brief thoughts:
As I see it, the forms of media and communication can be largely compared and ranked by formality, voice, and purpose. For the most part, a person chats, emails and publishes in three distinct manners -- even if in the subtlest of ways. The intended audience has a great deal to do with these changes in tone.
When I write for my weblog, I make assumptions about my audience. For one, I assume that they understand my sense of humor -- mostly self-deprecating jokes that often border on the absurd. Unfortunately, many times they don't.
So, I'm forced to question whether there is something wrong with my writing or something wrong with my readers. Or, is it something much more sinister: Is there something wrong with the weblog medium?
Saying a medium is young, therefore open to a lot of ambiguity is a lot kinder than proclaiming that "People have no sense of humor!"
Michael Sippey mentioned an interesting analogy at lunch: Television commercials contain a great deal of irony and humor and, for the most part, the majority of Americans are aware and understand this humor. If this same tone was brought into a weblog today, many would cease to understand or appreciate the joke. Why? Because we're used to television commericals and how they work. We know how to react because we know they want us to react. Give weblogs more time and that larger audience will get in on the joke. It's all about expectations.
When I was interviewed for the SXSW tech report I touched on this point and basically said that part of the confusion of tone lies in the fact that weblogs are by no means uniform and with each click, a reader encounters a different author's voice. If someone is used to sincerity on a weblog, they learn to expect sincerity.
Other than waiting for time to pass and the medium to evolve (or rather, perceptions shifting) , are there any solutions? Must we add metadata to our weblogs that would be equivalent to an emoticon ;). "I try to be funny" in the title field? Humorchalking? Do we relegate certain weblogs to certain areas or ghettos based on tone?
1 Comments
I have, perhaps, an academic point of view and see web logs as an evolution of the type of "immediacy" that Internet technologies enable.
As the capabilities of media evolve, we witness an evolution of public immediacy and "blogging" is a step in that evolution.
But this isn't new, I'm surprised that we do not hear more discussion of Live Journal in this context (www.livejournal.com). For the past two years, they have been something of a phenomenon among my teen children and their freinds. They are, I think, the vangard of web logging and Live Journal has become a nest of creativity.
The evolution of public immediacy runs like this:
Newspapers first bring the public daily reports of local and world events.
Television and Radio bring bring the public even greater immediacy, especially for sports and news. The collapse of the two towers of the World Trade Center and the O.J. Simpson drive along the LA Interstate are, perhaps, the best examples of the power of this immediacy.
The Internet brought a new immediacy, one in which participants are interactive. This began with the spread of BBS technology like FIDO, and later in the form of Usenet. Though these were mainly tools for specialists - my own quarter being in comp.parallel from 1988 to 1992 - where we saw the first notions of "net personality."
Email lists, the first generation Web, and now Blogs are on the same evolutionary path, each in turn bringing technology that improves the ease of broadcast and interaction.
The primary difference between the immediacy of O.J.'s drive and the evolution of Internet technologies is interactivity, but evenso - the primary audience of blogging is not the active participant like you and I, but the spectator.
Live Journal, has a stronger community angle through the inter-subscribing of friends and as a result seems to be more oriented toward participation with the extensive creation of things like fantasy fiction there.
There is something fundamentally different going on in the two communities. Live Journal has more of the Undernet and MUD community feel, while Blogging seems more about the evolution of personal publishing and feedback.
Live Journal requires a lot more effort than Blogging it seems to me, the teens and early twenties have it pretty much locked up. It is a place to go when you are defining yourself, when you are trying to determine the person you are or the person you want to be. While Blogging is better suited for the well defined statement of self.
It's a little too easy to get carried away by the invention of new terminology - a word of caution to my VC friends - but I do believe that Blogging could be the beginning of a second wave of public participation on the Internet.
However, I expect it to unfold pretty much as the first wave unfolded. The first to apply it are the creative individuals like yourself and Ben who see the creative potential. The second wave is the posting of body parts and pervasive banality - and we are clearly into that stage of the game at present. The third wave will be over investment by hyperbole and venture capital that may spring upon us the excesses of the 1990's - though I imagine only briefly.
However, the wave I'm betting on is the development of affinity interests, where blogging will enable technology that allows professionals, specialists and personality that were not enabled the first time around or were not able to sustain the dynamic effort required to produce good content.
The bottomline is, technologies like MT significantly reduce the cost and effort of maintaining immediacy and presense.
Regards,
Steven
PS. See the articles at www.definitionist.com for a discussion of immediacy.