January 17th, 2006
Bloggers Should Explain Blogging Technology
Simon Dumenco’s Ad Age Column, A Blogger Is Just A Writer With A Cooler Name, misses a crucial distinction between blogging and writing — it’s technology that enables the conversation. Steve Rubel almost makes this observation by linking throughout his response to the column, but he doesn’t draw it out explicitly. Steve is absolutely right that the difference is in the dialogue, but I think the role of technology is what makes that distinction meaningful.
Without the power of trackbacks and pingbacks, the blogosphere would be a much more inefficient and less effective place. The problem for bloggers is that most Old Media people don’t understand that aspect of the technology. (I’ll confess that I was quite flummoxed by it when I started blogging.) Bloggers have done a great job helping people understand the innovation of blogging as “conversation,” but we haven’t done much to help people understand the technology — I was accused by one commenter on BuzzMachine of creating spam with the automatic trackback that I generated when I linked to the post, which lead me to post a (probably much too spirited) defense.
And this was from someone who appears to be a regular blog reader. Imagine how confusing it must be to someone who takes a casual look at blogs. I think it’s wrong (even condescending) to assume that the average person (or even Old Media vets) who are curious about blogging either can’t or don’t want to understand the technology. Perhaps if Simon Dumenco’s 30-something friend had explained it to him, he could have written a column to explain it to Old Media executives.
Too bad I can’t trackback to Simon’s column. Maybe he should petition AdAge to start his own blog — or just start one, like the rest of us did. No better way to learn than by doing.
Topics: Blogs | New Media | Publishing 2.0 | Technology | Traditional Media
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Blogging is not inherently about the conversation. You’ve been suckered in. Sometimes conversations happen, but they are not guaranteed. Read more.
As for “blogging technology,” these guys explain it enough– they go the all the conferences, they posted about it everyday– but the high-flying consultants tend to not understand the architecture at all.
BTW, I’m a subscriber to the Atlantic, and a big fan.
Jon, you’re right that conversations are not guaranteed. I have had to work very hard to get conversations going here, mostly by doing my part to participate in conversations at other blogs. It’s a give and take, but that’s what’s so enjoyable about it.
I went to the post at your blog, but didn’t see an obvious way to post comments — is that why you have a negative view of conversations?
Blogging technology may get explained, but I’d love to see some examples where the explanation was intended for the average person and not other members of the blogosphere. These may well exist, and I just haven’t come across them yet.
[ Publishing 2.0 ] Simon Dumenco’s Ad Age Column, A Blogger Is Just A Writer With A Cooler Name, misses a crucial distinction between blogging and writing  it’s technology that enables the conversation. Steve Rubel almost makes this observation
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Scott– Login first. Jon
[…] Purely for the sake of discourse (about bloggers explaining blogging)… […]
Purely for the sake of discourse (about bloggers explaining blogging)…
Do you have to understand the technology that gives us antibiotics, or insulin to get value out of it if or when you need it? At the end of the day Language and Typography are also technologies, indeed arguably blogging is the same technology in a newer guise of evolution, if anything the difference lies in the receding barrier to participation and one could argue that it is actually a new tendril of the organic growth of the socio-cultural phenomena(/meta-meme?) of democracy. Human computer interaction teaches that the more efficient technology is, the more invisible it is, simply allowing the user to do whatever they choose to do as quickly and easily as possible.
With more and more blog entries appearing in online search results and other media channels familiarity will increase and eventually, many will become proficient in blog technologies without ever really noticing or having it explained to them, purely because as a specie we excel in creating mental models (be they acurate or not) from experience through pattern recognition (and many of us suck at anything that feels like reading a help-file). Which is not necessarily a good thing. The downside is that this often means we accept and take to ridiculous extremes new technologies to discover the cost much too late. (But that’s another topic)
If anything, perhaps we need better terminology for things like ‘trackbacs’ and ‘pingbacks’ –and while we are at - it might be a good idea to resolve the semantic quagmire brewing in the mix between ‘tags’ meaning ‘keywords’ and ‘tags’ meaning mark-up code-elements.
just 20c worth.. :- )
besides ’should’ seems a bit facist don’t you think?
I find it fascinating that every time I’ve suggested we need to do a better job explaining New Media technology to the average person — whether it be RSS or trackbacks — the responses I get take this to mean explaining how the technology works at a highly technical level, i.e. how many lines of code it takes. It’s probably my fault for not being clear — I mean explaining what the technology does. Of course, the average person don’t need to understand at a technical level how trackbacks work. But they should understand the difference between a comment and a trackback.
I’m all for having faith that as a “species we excel in creating mental models (be they acurate or not) from experience through pattern recognition” — but that doesn’t mean we can’t use a glossary from time to time. Why make it hard for people? What’s wrong with going the extra mile to make it easy?
And if putting forth a suggestion with the word “should” is fascist, we all might as well pack up and go home.
I think trackbacks are flawed — especially when interleaved with comments rather than shown in a separate section. Compared to a comment (which is typically a direct reply and formatted in paragraphs), they usually LOOK like spam (no paragraph breaks) and often READ like spam (an excerpt that may not seem related since the relevant part may be later in the linked post, or may look like a bad copy of the article since the linked post often starts with an excerpt).
I vote for fixing the technology rather than explaining away the flaws. (And, for the record, kudos to the inventors of trackback; it’s a great first cut.)
Great blog BTW.
when i want to see what people are saying elsewhere about an idea in a post of mine, i first look to the trackbacks and then to technorati. trackbacks have their own spamming issues (both bot and human), but essentially, they truly are what tie together threads of conversations across the web.
regarding the ux issues, i agree they should be segregated, but with an order identifier (as in the order it appeared as a comment to the post, mixed in with the comments).
as for the dumenco article, i’m on the same page with you scott. i ended up sending him an email and then posting itmyself because i couldn’t post a comment to his “writing.”
is as chic as parachute pants, I guess we’ll be seeing a lot more ‘writers’ online. The conversationalists: Brain of the Blogger Ad Age Says There Is No Such Things as Blogging..But The Name Is Cool Blogging Isn’t Just Writing, It’s a Dialogue Bloggers Should Explain Blogging Technology Blogs are (public) conversations, almost like a giant party - This post at least emphasises the public nature of commenting versus emailing.
[…] This weeks scrutiny is focused on writers / converationalists / audience / staff. Perhaps it’s a little of all.This is the article that started this buzz by Simon: “A Blogger is just a writer with a cooler name”. Clever, I get his stance, (isn’t it interesting that his piece is an article rather than a blog) more importantly, it’s interesting to see how consumer generated ‘conversational ‘opinions’ are now mixing with mainstream ‘traditional’ sources.By the way, I think Simon is very clever (I said that already) the best way to get eyeballs is to piss off the bloggers.I still think that blogs are NOT important. That’s kinda of ironic, given I’m a corporate blog evangelist. I think we should focus on the conversation, the web is more ‘two-way’ than before.Amy still thinks that as well, maybe we should start a club. There’s a lot of discussion around the value of a blogger, and what kind or writing style (if any) it is. Steve Rubel gets it, If blogging is just writing, then are instant messages just writing too?Although I try to avoid the technical details and technology when explaining blogs to blog virgins, Scott does point out why blogging technology enables conversations to be connected (rss). Again, I stand that these technologies are just enablers, a new ‘mo betta’ tool will come along in a few months.I wonder how companies will treat employee opinions (blogs) in relation to traditional enterprise created Marcom? Slowly, these will merge, as the conversations (blogs, podcasts, and soon to be video) between employee, customer, and corporate blur.We should stop focusing on enablers and methods, and start focusing on what’s really important, and that nearly whole world is communicating/dancing now. […]
Scott
While I try to avoid talking about the tools with blog virgins (as I think the focus should be on the results of the communications) you’ve brought up the tools at the right time. RSS is an enabler and connector for the conversation, good points
Jeremiah Owyang
:- ) fair enough