Blogging’s Missing Links

Chris Shipley , the Demo and DemoMobile host-producer, and I were sharing blogger anecdotes over lunch recently. We both started blogging about five months ago, and have both focused on our respective essay-writing styles. We admitted to each other that the jargon and information structure had been challenging for us as neophytes.

For example, we learned that we both remain manifestly clueless on links. While we both understand links are for bloggers what Nielson ratings are for TV producers, we aren’t exactly sure how to get linked or why. What’s the difference between hyperlinks and permalinks or, for that matter, a sausage or a golf link? I think, I’ve linked to others in the copy of all my blogs, but my outbound links are much lower when I check at Technorati I wonder—are Chris and I missing links?

While I didn’t ask her, I imagine Chris also shares my paucity of understanding about pointers. I know my lack of them implies to some my insignificance to some. When I politely challenged my friend Doc Searls on the relevance of a “blogging A list,” Russell Beattie , another alleged A-lister was quick to point out that Doc has 2150 pointers to my meager nine indicating, as he said, “a vast gulf” between me and the A-List. Perhaps so.

I have to admit that I love blogging's self-publishing benefits, but it will be truly easy to use when I can just do the whole thing in Word, then hit return and have all the links and whatever the Hell they are get uploaded in a single click. When I'm at Feedster looking at a string of RSS, to be honest, I cannot discern it from old-fashioned HTML, C++ or for that matter Sanskrit. Nor do I want to. I don't want to become more technically proficient. I just want to write this potpouri of essays comments and conceits.

It seems to me, that if it is to reach its true potential, blogging needs to be easier for people everwhere to simply click on and self-publish. Those who have not yet come may not want to understand how it works or why.

Shipley and I, have different places in the technology community. What’s similar is that we have both spent significant portions of our professional lives helping large circles of people to understand the value of what small circles of tech-zealots have developed. We’ve both been around the block enough times to know the neighborhood. The value of the property rises onbly when when more people wish to reside here and that takes greater clarity than we have today.

When, I decided to blog I went to the community's "core four" sites-- Feedster, Technorati, News Gator and TypePad. I spent two days frustrated and confused until a "blogging buddy," Buzz Bruggeman taught me what to do with each of these four sites, but I’m still deciphering the finer points and there are parts of each I still don’t grasp, even though I’ve posted nearly 50 blogs.

According to Technorati , there are over 2.1 million active bloggers and the number is rising at the rate of 10,000 per week. That only gets us another 500,000 bloggers a year, and most people seem to think the number will be in the 100s of millions, and instead of just RSS, blogs will be sent as text, photos and eventually rich media. They be broadcast to a few friends or the entire world not just from PCs but handsets as well. As David Weinberger recently speculated: “It won’t even be called blogging.”

For that to happen, blogging needs to appeal to the rest of us. It needs to be amazingly easy to learn and use and the companies in position to lead the next communications revolution need to become simpler and more seductive to newcomers. Intimidating language and sending end-users to code-laden pages only set barriers where bridges should be built.

Comments

[Russ]

Hey, hey, hey! Hold on a sec. I never claimed to be an A-Lister. I'm not anywhere near the A-listers in terms of traffic or links. Mostly this is due to the fact that I regularly cull my readership with quarterly semi-insane leftist rants and am quite proud of it.

You can consider me a "B-Lister" if you'd like (this is my own term). It means I have a popular and "known" blog, but not so much traffic and links that people fawn over me in public or anything like that.

Blogging is a marathon, not a sprint. If you wrote every day and linked every day, you would eventually get noticed and become "part of the conversation" a bit more and rankings and traffic would follow. At first it's like you're talking to yourself, but very soon you start getting that great feedback which makes blogging really worth it.

As for the barrier to entry? Well, I think the tools will continue to get easier and more accessible by everyone. The weblogging concept has already lowered the barrier and raised the quality of personal online content considerably (compare Geocities circa 1997 to TypePad 2004, for example). This trend will continue, I'm sure.

By the way, you know how you can tell a newbie blogger from a "real" blogger? Newbies talk about blogging. "What am I doing? Why are we doing this? This is all new and interesting..." and other sorts of comments along those lines.

;-)

Remember: Daily bloggers are the best bloggers!

Keep it up!

-Russ

[Trudy W. Schuett]

There's still a lot of confusion about blogs, the etiquette, and terminology. Last summer when I first got into all this, I often found myself explaining what a blog was and wasn't, and there are still some (mostly employees of traditional media outlets) that disparage all blogs as poorly-written, far too personal diaries. Well, we know that's no longer true, and blogs are now available on many subjects, with a clear business or educational focus.

I think what happens is that for some reason people are trying to make it more complicated than it is. Maybe this is because some people just are determined that anything having to do with technology absolutely must be complex and arcane. There are still a lot of Luddites floating around!

But I think that the confusion and even the current etiquette and procedures will eventually go by the wayside, as more blogs become serious information exchanges. The current A-listers will likely be as popular, since they are very good for their purposes, but not all blogs will have the same function. More often than not, I think, they will be intended for a carefully focused group of readers and not intended to bring fame for the author or webmaster.

Time will tell, I guess! But I remember there being a lot of confusion and disinformation floating around when I went online in 1995. People didn't always understand that an e-mail list was different than a newsgroup, and a search engine was not a portal, and no, the government was NOT watching you thru your monitor. ;>) (had to put that in! )

Things got straightened out, and I have every reason to believe that blogs will too.

[Roger Benningfield]

Shel: "...it will be truly easy to use when I can just do the whole thing in Word, then hit return and have all the links and whatever the Hell they are get uploaded in a single click."

Most blogapps (particularly the hosted versions) are 80% of the way there. For example, I can click "New" in Outlook, type up my entry, and attach a photo... then I just address it to my JournURL-powered blog, click "Send", and it gets posted. If I know how to send email, I already know the basics.