Paul Jacobson

I just had a brief debate with Suzan Gray which merits a longer response than Twitter can accommodate in 140 characters (and which also demonstrates my point):

… to which I replied (somewhat tongue in cheek):

… and Suzan retorted:

While Twitter is known as a micro-blogging service, it is really more of the following:

• verbal diarrhea enabler;
• notification service; and/or
• status update service.

I’ve debated its use as a chat service and despite being very poorly suited for chat, users do use it for that.

What Twitter is not, however, is a replacement for a longer form blog. If anything were to come close to that (assuming there is a real need to replace longer form blogs) it would be more like Posterous or Tumblr than Twitter or some other service limited to 140 character bursts.

People who believe that Twitter is the best thing since *INSERT THE LAST GREAT THING* are drinking way too much Twitter Koolaid. Twitter launched in about 2006 and was touted as being so amazing because of its simplicity: you could sent 140 character messages and connect to other users. Well, that simplicity is rapidly disappearing with Twitter starting to look a lot like FriendFeed (although I am sure some fanboys and fangirls will insist it has retained its pristine simplicity or try rationalise that simplicity’s loss) and Twitter is still so unstable that the #failwhale has become part of pop culture (maybe its a feature, not a bug).

Twitter is not all its fans make it out to be. Sure it is a useful service and as much as I dislike it at times like this, I use it daily. It is not the best of breed when it comes to a number of its uses but I have learned that what drives adoption is not quality (otherwise Jaiku and FriendFeed would be huge) but rather what seems cool and is good enough. People on the Web can be stupid that way.

When it comes to blogging, Twitter can’t possibly be a viable medium to express complex thoughts and ideas in much detail. Twitter is the Web’s fast food. It just isn’t going to be as good for idea and information sharing as longer form blogs. What it is good for is connecting people to those longer form content items and that is how the majority of people I am connected to use Twitter.

Twitter “micro-blog” posts are fleeting and virtually insubstantial in real terms. A tweet is soon lost in the massive (and rapidly growing) ocean of tweets. Twitter search only goes back a couple days and if you are a prolific tweeter, your oldest posts are gone because Twitter only retains a limited number of your tweets (my first tweets are lost to me). Blog posts, on the other hand, remain as long as the blog is maintained. They form a more coherent and comprehensive story and are, themselves, sources of breakout discussions and stories.

So you think #Twitter is a better expressive tool than #blogs? #fail!

I’ve just been listening to an episode of The Digital Edge and a segment about blogging in South Africa specifically. The segment ties in with a post on Moral Fibre recently about the nature of blogging and further develops this apparent aversion to being called a “blogger” and having what bloggers do being called “blogging”. The issue is expressed in this extract from Vincent’s post on Moral Fibre:

I have never blogged. To have blogged would mean that I’ve waxed lyrical about my day to day activities, after all it is a biographical log, and I am meant to charitably steer it like a captain might his log of events – I have not done this. Perhaps this is not is not a dilemma, it is however mine and I shall now extol the virtues of questioning the questionable art form. Having started an online journal of sorts, Moral Fibre, in which I have always encouraged others to write about whatever they like, I’ve oft referred to what our writers do as blogging. Blogging with a difference, is perhaps a little more like it, but others have referred to me as a blogger, and our motley crew of writers as bloggers too – the name like a nickname conferred upon you by your peers has stuck. We apparently blog here at Moral Fibre. To which I say;

Fuck off get a new name!

I don’t understand this aversion to the term “blog” or this persistent notion that a blog is a diary written by some teenage girl online where she talks about her nails and boys she likes. I thought we got past this terrible stereotype years ago but it appears not. To pigeonhole blogs even further they are portrayed as being bad sources of news (along with the likes of Twitter). According to Vincent (fast becoming the poster boy for blog denialism), writing in another post on his personal blog about the likelihood that we will receive our news online once current media takes a swan dive into bankruptcy -

If your answer to that is microblogging, blogging and a network of open information you’re sorely mistaken. Twitter has been known to provide near immediate coverage of news worthy events, however more already visible to a global audience. I’m not convinced a twitter-reaction to a highly visible event can be compared to a journalist calling up reliable sources to uncover mismanagement in a corporate which employs thousands of individuals. I cannot imagine a blogger, or citizen journalist for that matter, with the demands of his/her day job taking time off of work to chase leads, adopt a moniker and infiltrate a state run department to uncover an arms deal gone awry. Can you?

I am still trying to get a handle on precisely what Vincent and like-minded “experts” believe blogs are (placing all blogs in that category of teenage-girl-writing-about-her-life is a gross oversimplification of what a blog is) but a blog, to me, is a publishing tool that can be used to a variety of things ranging from inane posts about boys at school to hard, earth-shattering news. To categorise a blog as an amateurish tool (this is certainly how it was portrayed on The Digital Edge) does a great many bloggers a disservice. In fact, that sort of portrayal is downright insulting.

Now I don’t profess to be a journalist (I was not trained as a journalist and have no ambitions to be a journalist) but when I write about something it is frequently news. It may not be the quality you would get from a professional journalist blogging somewhere (and yes, this notion that bloggers and journalists are necessarily exclusive is another misleading and inaccurate categorisation) but it has some value to my readers. Vincent may not believe he is a blogger and is searching for a suitable label to apply to his activities but, in my eyes, he is a blogger. He operates Moral Fibre using WordPress MU, a blogging tool. Whatever he calls it, Moral Fibre is a blog.

I don’t see what is wrong with calling a blog a blog either. It sounds a bit silly but being a blogger is potentially a very respectable occupation, regardless of whether you are a professional or amateur, paid or unpaid. Bloggers have been responsible for exposing hidden truths and doing great work to promote freedom of expression. Heck, the very act of blogging is an exercise of the right to freedom of expression. Maybe it is fashionable to refuse the “blogger” mantle (in which case you go right ahead and call yourself whatever floats your boat) but there is no shame in being one.

There is no denying that there are blogs of varying quality and value. There are a great many blogs that are just not subscribing to at all and, at the same time, there are some blogs that shape industries. They are few and far between but they exist and there is no doubt that they are a source of considerable news. While I am not a die hard Twitter fan, microblogging services like Twitter, FriendFeed and others can also be terrific sources of breaking news. At the same time, the micro format renders those services unsuitable for any in depth news coverage but they form a valuable part of the “newsy” ecosystem online.

The recent advances in realtime technologies have shifted the spotlight back to blogs as important sources of news and information, particularly with news of FriendFeed’s acquisition (which has both cast doubt on this terrific service’s future and oddly spawned a new batch of Google Reader fanatics) and the tr.im debacle. Despite all the hype about Twitter and a number of other services that have popped up from time to time, blogs remain one of the most effective ways to get a story out on to the Web and start conversations. Those realtime tools I mentioned earlier in this paragraph, like PubSubHubbub, mean that the flow of content from these blogs is now happening in realtime and that makes them pretty compelling.

Bottom line here is that blogs are not just personal diaries anymore. Anyone who still believes that has had his or her head in a 20th century hole in the ground. They are very much a part of the current information/news/social Web and, yes, they really are called blogs.

Oh, contrary to Vincent’s comment about blogs being “biographical logs” (convenient if you are arguing that blogs are just inane personal diaries), the word “blog” is a contraction of “web log”. There is a difference.

I have been thinking about this question for a little while now. Anyone who has been following me recently will have noticed a certain degree of emphasis on Nokia and its products and services. In fact, looking back at my last 20 posts (not including this one), 6 were not specifically about Nokia or a Nokia product/service. I have also tweeted extensively about Nokia and its products/services. You can be forgiven for asking this question Rich Mulholland asked me the other day:

Now while I am pretty public about my approach to what I write about, questions like Rich’s have me thinking about which rules bloggers should/could play by and what the implications of not playing by those (or any) rules may be.

There was some talk a number of years ago about bloggers being citizen journalists. This was pretty controversial at the time because there were these upstart bloggers encroaching on more traditional journalists’ territory without the overhead of an editorial process and a variety of checks and balances that journalists are supposed to comply with. Bloggers, it seemed, wanted all the benefits journalists enjoy without the limitations and controls they are subject to. Those limitations and controls exist for good reasons, not least of which is to keep the press a reliable source of information. It was around that time, or perhaps shortly afterwards, that someone (I don’t remember who and I can’t find the post) published a post on Thought Leader (I think) about how journalists have the benefit of a sort of quality control process in the form of their editors and other similar mechanisms which help keep them honest. Of course this is an ideal situation because there have been comments about declining journalistic standards and ethics leading to a relatively poor state of journalism at some publications.

So here we are, a couple years later, and bloggers are attracting more and more attention by companies who would otherwise focus their PR efforts on traditional journalists. Bloggers are invited to product launches, site visits and other media events. I was recently flown to Dubai together with a journalist to cover a Nokia media event. It wasn’t too long ago that no-one would seriously have considered sending a blogger, of all people, to an event like that and yet here we are. Last week a number of bloggers were sent to the Seacom landing site. I estimate that there were at least as many bloggers on that trip as there were traditional journalists, if not more. The reason for this is fairly obvious. Bloggers are networked and can be pretty influential in their niches. Some bloggers even have mainstream journalists following them and engaging with them.

None of this background really answers my question though. If bloggers are treated a bit like journalists, should they play by the same rules? Should bloggers gather information in a similar way, approach the material from a similar perspective and adopt a similar stance towards the subject matter of their posts or do bloggers have the flexibility to do things differently?

I suppose it is a little simplistic to assume that all bloggers want the same thing and approach their work in the same way. It is also a good idea to remember that many traditional journalists are bloggers too and they approach their blogging with the discipline they apply to their careers as journalists (blogging may even be part of that work too). It is probably more helpful to focus on the blogger’s activity instead. Does the blogger’s work resemble a journalist’s or is it something else? Does a blogger purport to cover her material as if she were a journalist or does he approach his material in a more casual manner?

I write about things I am passionate about. I believe that this passion means I am incapable of being unbiased about what I write about and I instead focus on being authentic in my posts. I write what I feel, think and believe rather than what I am told to write. That has become my measure of success as a blogger. In doing so I also attract criticism for being too focussed on particular brands or topics. Does this undermine my credibility? I don’t really know and I would rather be as transparent as I can be about my influences and leave it up to my readers to decide how much weight, if any, to give to what I write.

That may be the wrong approach. Perhaps bloggers should follow some baseline set of guidelines. Authenticity would be one of those guidelines but there may well be more guidelines dealing with degrees of detachment from the subject matter of a post and other measures designed to ensure more objectivity and a more balanced approach. I tend to think of bloggers being a little like Romulans to journalists’ Vulcans – influenced more strongly by emotions and willing to follow them in a post. Should bloggers be more detached? Is there a line to be crossed at which point a blogger goes too far? If there is, where is that line?

Photo credit: Journalist taking notes by quinn.anya published under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license