Building new communities learning from weblogs

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Building new communities - learning from weblogs
Mainstream / Personal (1)

• Some ways that mainstream web media can interact
  with the revolution in personal publishing
• Tom Coates plasticbag.org

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Whats a weblog?

• Meg from notsosoft.com asked Google this
  question And it said that weblogs are

• a Natural for Librarians
• ... probably the next logical evolution of print
  zines, and zines are always nice
• ... the new Borg.
• ... my friend!
• ... just lists of short blurbs documenting
  pedestrian events in the writer's life, usually
  with links to other pages the author finds
  interesting.
• ... journalism for the future.
• ... destined to become a powerful, dirt-cheap
  tool for e-learning
• ... what some would call the Web's equivalent of
  a sophisticated early warning radar system.
• ... a GAL's best friend!

• ... also often called a news page.
• ... "useful" because they enable informational
  sorting and distribution.
• ... mostly used to broadcast information.
• ... a learning tool.
• ... gut-simple to set up.
• ... mostly personal diaries. ...
• ... a form of communication hitherto unknown.
• ... so bad
• ... almost as old as the web
• ... quick and easy to publish
• ... updated often and may contain profanity

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But what exactly is a weblog?

• For our purposes today, a weblog is
• A kind of site mostly maintained by individuals
  or occasionally small groups and communities...
• Regularly updated with a newest writings at the
  top style chronology
• With content consisting of any of the following
  journal content, articles, links or links and
  commentary
• Often run using a tool that automates the process
  of posting (a cheap or free low-grade Content
  Management System).

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Why the hell should you care?

• There have been at least one million separate
  weblogs created.
• There are weblogs being maintained in almost
  every major country, in almost every major
  language, on almost every subject.
• Popular personal sites can get several thousand
  page views a day. Popular communal weblogs
  (metafilter, slashdot) get many tens - or even
  hundreds - of thousands.
• A very popular link that circulates within the
  weblog community might get tens of thousands of
  page views a day.
• Links and news stories that have broken online
  often cross back over into mainstream tv, print
  and radio.

Proper reasons in a minute First things first -
lets look at the scale of weblogging
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Mainstream media reacts (1)

• Journalistic interactions with weblogs
• Using weblogs as research tools
• Writing about weblogs
• Articles (hundreds in every kind of newspaper and
  magazine - with the most high profile probably
  being the New Yorker article Youve Got Blog,
  featuring Meg Hourihan (megnut.com) and Jason
  Kottke (kottke.org)
• Books (Weve Got Blog, Essential Blogging, The
  Weblog Handbook, We Blog, Running Weblogs with
  Slash) etc.

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Mainstream media reacts (2)

• Running competitions to find the Best Weblogs
• The largest competition to date has been the
  Guardians Best British Blog competition which
  had celebrity judges (including Anita Roddick)
  and a prize of 1000.
• The competition was won by http//scaryduck.blogsp
  ot.com

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Mainstream media reacts (3)

• Hosting weblogs themselves
• Several mainstream publishers have considered
  hosting their own weblogs
• Salon.com has this service now (with help from
  Radio Userland)
• Boston.com has announced its intention to
  introduce more weblog-related functionality.
• Even our own Guardian seriously considered
  forming a relationship with Blogger.com to host
  weblogs

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The limits of these reactions

• These interactions break down into two halves
• Totally conventional publishing reactions to
  things which they do not believe affect them
  directly.
• Simultaneously an attempt to co-opt or assert
  dominance over a newly dangerous kind of populist
  medium

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Towards a better model

• Rather than treating weblogs as an object to be
  studied or as a territory to be claimed,
  mainstream publishers should be looking to build
  tools that increase interaction between the two
  types of site - making both better in the process

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What does a weblog do?

• To see how mainstream and personal publishers
  could interact, first we have to understand what
  individual weblogs do.
• They allow individuals to express their opinions.
• They contain links to things filtered by their
  owners interests.
• They contain comments and discussion about these
  links.
• They act as a place where someone can react to
  another persons opinions
• They are adverts for the person who owns them.
• They are ungoverned, independent spaces for
  self-expression.

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Doesnt sound very impressive

• Individually, weblogs are decidedly unimpressive.
  They only provide an outlet for the particular
  whims and interests of the person who runs them.
  However brilliant or interesting that person is,
  theres little or no justification for a large
  media organisation to form an ongoing
  relationship with their site Luckily, however,
  there are hundreds of thousands of weblogs which
  changes things dramatically

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When you scale up

• You have a mechanism that filters information
  down to what is specifically interesting to
  people. (Individuals filter according to their
  own interests)
• You have a mechanism which disseminates pertinent
  information and links to a large group of people
  (If the filtering leads to a good piece of
  information or a good link it will spread
  quickly).
• You get a body of commentary, opinion and debate
  connected to these links.
• You can start to collate information about what
  is interesting to people at any given point of
  time. (Blogdex)
• You have emerging forms of interpersonal
  community.
• And all without any need for moderation, legal
  advice or substantial management

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These are new resources

• For the most part, these are resources that
  mainstream media doesnt normally have direct
  access to - and they are valuable. From the side
  of mainstream publishers, each of those aspects
  of personal publishing represents an opportunity
  for development.
• BUT

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Its not all about you

• Both practically and ethically, it is in the best
  interests of mainstream publishers to be
  intelligent and responsible in the way that they
  work with personal publishers. The simpler an
  idea is to implement and the more useful the idea
  is to weblog publishers themselves - the more
  likely it is to be incorporated into weblog
  culture.
• The two parties - mainstream and personal
  publishers - should be looking for ways in which
  to do new and more useful things together, rather
  than ways to exploit one another. If your concept
  has nothing to offer webloggers, then dont be
  surprised if it doesnt take off

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Some potential interactions

• Three ideas for complementary relationships
  between mainstream and personal publishers
• Integrating Trackback and Blog-This tools into
  your content site.
• The Internal Blogdex
• On this day functionality

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Trackback and Blog-This

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The Internal Blogdex

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The Internal Blogdex (2)

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On this day (1)

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On this day (2)

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Thanks to

• Matt Jones ( blackbeltjones.com )
• Matt Webb ( interconnected.org/home )
• Marcia Beek ( dutchbint.org )
• The UKBloggers mailing list.