Paul Jacobson

Di Heuser is a single mom with 3 beautiful children and my long time friend. She started scrapbooking in late 2007 and shifted to digital scrapbooking around October 2008. She launched her blog, Legacy4Life, on 27 December 2008 and was accepted as a scrapbooking designer by two scrapbooking stores in roughly July 2009. Why am I telling you this? I’m telling you this because her blog is a reminder of the value of blogging in this age of micro-content and agency powered content streams.

I’ve had a couple debates with people on Twitter about the apparently declining value of blogs and RSS in the face of Twitter’s growth and yet what I see is a departure from the principles and values that underpinned the social media revolution which began almost a decade ago with the introduction of this new medium called “weblogs”, or “blogs”. Despite being an opportunity for more intimate personal interaction, many businesses’ Twitter accounts are maintained by marketing agencies and where those businesses have blogs, their blogs tend to be written by their advisors rather than by someone actually at the coal-face, so to speak.

This trend is more of a return to the command-and-control style interaction that customers rebelled against more than a decade ago and which prompted the famous statement from the Cluetrain Manifesto:

Markets are conversations

Di’s blog is a reminder about some of the values that seem to have been forgotten in modern marketing initiatives on the social Web. It is also a reminder of how valuable and relevant “old fashioned” tools like blogs and RSS are, even as Twitter continues to grow and prominent social media luminaries speculate about RSS’ demise and its replacement by Twitter as a medium for content delivery.

I’ve been chatting to Di about her blog and two things piqued my interest: she mentioned that interest in her blog had picked up noticeably when she started sharing news about her personal life and her family and also that her blog has attracted over 1 000 unique visitors since 1 January 2010 (about 2 days ago). That may not seem like a lot of traffic to some bloggers but consider that the blog launched in December 2008 and is focused on scrapbooking. Di told me that her readers tend to be mothers and grandmothers, not exactly the demographic you would expect to be heavily involved in blogging and online media. Just the same, these scrapbooking women are precisely the sort of niche market books have been written about.

These women are interested, engaged and truly passionate about scrapbooking. Actually, they are passionate about memories and family and when Di shares family and personal stories and experiences she becomes a person her customers can identify with and relate to on a very personal level. This dynamic shouldn’t be new to you if you’ve been involved in social marketing but it does appear to be a dynamic many marketers have forgotten in the race to get their clients on to the social Web. It is also a reminder that blogs and RSS are still relevant to the majority of Internet users and, in all likelihood, your customers too.

There is far too much focus on Twitter and talk about Twitter as the new multi-purpose medium but it still a fairly limited technology, despite its utility. It is really one tool in a toolkit that still includes blogs and RSS. As Di pointed out to me when we chatted briefly about Twitter:

Yeah except you cannot display a layout on Twitter

I realise my insistence that blogs and RSS are still relevant and valuable media on the social Web makes me sound a little old fashioned by Web standards. At the same time too much focus on one or other medium is just misguided. Twitter is a powerful tool and so are blogs, Facebook pages, RSS feeds and even email. I often wonder if all the hype about Twitter has resulted in a complete lack of perspective.

Legacy4Life’s success is due largely to Di’s authenticity on her blog. She shares real experiences with her readers and they connect to her on a very personal level. This is what social media is about.

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.

The conversation isn’t happening in one place, on a single service and if you expect to be part of that conversation you should be looking at services that are better suited for these distributed conversations. So what is a distributed conversation? Well, it is a conversation that takes place across multiple platforms and services about the same topic. Take my recent blog post titled “Why you’re wrong about FriendFeed” as an example.

There were a couple comments posted to the blog itself (about 4 – there was an issue with my Disqus integration and one or two comments were misdirected) but the majority of the discussion about the blog post was on Twitter and FriendFeed. If I only paid attention to my blog I probably wouldn’t see those other discussions and I would miss out on an opportunity to engage in a conversation with those commentators.

There is a considerable amount of emphasis on specific services like Twitter and some commentators go so far as to say that Twitter has such a lead on any comparable service that none of those services really have a hope of catching up to it perhaps even surpassing it. This is a little ironic considering Facebook’s overwhelming dominance in the social space, at least as a single service. It dwarf’s Twitter and yet Twitter is held up as the social Web’s Second Coming. One of the challenges facing Twitter is that it does not contain the sum total of the conversations on the Web about any given topic. It is a single input, not the whole shebang. It’s simplicity makes it a fantastic tool for disseminating ideas, messages and information but it remains one content stream in the greater ocean of content.

There are a number of other content streams which collectively comprise the broader conversation about a given topic and these vary from conversation to conversation. Returning to my example of my blog post, there are four content streams which comprise the conversation. The first is the blog post itself; the second are the comments posted beneath the blog post; the third are the Twitter mentions and responses and the fourth are the comments on FriendFeed. Focussing on any one of these content streams means missing out on the rest of the conversation.

The challenge is how to keep track of these conversations across these multiple platforms. An obvious way to do this is by taking advantage of a number of services that are focussed on comments. I wrote about this a little while ago in my post titled “Time to get serious about comments“. I specifically mentioned CoComment, Disqus and Backtype as three services which are unlocking the value in comments. I have been using Disqus on a couple of my sites and it is a terrific service. Its latest iteration gives you the option of pulling in mentions of your content elsewhere on the Web and representing those mentions in you comment stream. It calls these mentions “social reactions” and the result is a broader view of the distributed conversation.

I had a few technical glitches on this blog which led to comments being disassociated with the blog posts they were intended for so I disabled Disqus on this blog until the cause could be identified and resolved and began exploring Backtype a little more. Backtype is basically a search engine for comments. It uses information you give it when you create an account to find your comments which you have posted and to find comments other people have posted on a wide variety of social services. The result is an aggregated representation of the distributed conversation.

I chatted briefly to Christopher Golda, Backtype’s founder, over email about Backtype and he gave me a great summary of what Backtype does:

BackType lets you follow conversations in a few different ways:

1) By Author — you can follow comments by author using the Dashboard
2) By Keywords — you can follow specific keywords with Search, and sign up for BackType Alerts so you receive e-mails whenever terms are mentioned
3) By Page — you can follow the conversation happening on and around a specific page

2) and 3) let you track conversations that involve people that you’re not following. The third is broken down into two separate features:

a) BackType Subscriptions — receive e-mails whenever someone comments on a particular URL
b) BackType Connect — surfaces the conversations related to a particular URL

Users can also set their preferences to automatically subscribe to comments on pages or posts they comment on so you can keep track on an ongoing conversation. This is a little like subscribing to a comment feed although you can customise how you want to receive the updates (email on different schedules, RSS or on your Backtype subscriptions page). This subscription tool is called “Connect” and it is a pretty effective way to track conversations connected with your posts and content elsewhere. Returning to my example of my blog post, here is the Backtype Connect page focussed on that post:

Here is another example. This is the Backtype Connect page focussed on a post I wrote on web.tech.law a little while ago about the controversial Facebook terms of use. It is perhaps a better example because there are conversational elements from a wider variety of sites and services (look for the icons on the right hand side):

To take this all a little further, you can stream your Backtype comments into FriendFeed and add them to the ocean of content available there. I won’t rehash my views about FriendFeed and why I believe it is a superior platform for conversation but I will say that when you combine Backtype and FriendFeed you have a particularly powerful set of tools to help you track and participate in the distributed conversation. Using FriendFeed you can track a far greater content array. Backtype helps you find track and participate in conversations that you are either involved in as an initiator or participant. It can also help you find conversations about topics that interest you and jump in using its various search options.

Twitter fans have another tool available to them from the Backtype team that enables them to track mentions of a specific url on Twitter. It is called BackTweets and what distinguishes this tool from Twitter’s own search engine is that BackTweets isn’t fooled by url shorteners. This is what a BackTweet search looks like:

By the way, the ff.im url is a FriendFeed url link back to a FriendFeed post that has been reposted to Twitter.

Bottom line here is that tracking the distributed conversation is becoming easier with tools like Backtype and, dare I say it, FriendFeed. It should be obvious by now that limiting yourself to a single content stream is cutting yourself out of the broader conversation that is taking place around you. If you want to take a narrow view of that conversation then that is your choice but if you want to know what people are really saying, you should take a close look at these services.