Weblogs — Why They’re Still Not ‘Happening’

blog process
My blogging process.

The Zahmoo blog, champion of a story-telling-based bottom-up change process called Most Significant Change, is asking bloggers to explain the Most Significant Change that has resulted from their blogging activity since they started blogging.

But what I think is most significant is all the changes that have not occurred despite the explosion of weblogs and attention given to them:

  • The business world has not embraced weblogs, and has not significantly changed its ‘information behaviours’ as a result of the availability of blogging content and tools.
  • The news media have not significantly changed their business models or means of operating or communicating as a result of weblogs — tens of millions of supposed new ‘competitors’.
  • The education process has not significantly changed as a result of the availability of a great deal of new, free, context-rich information on weblogs.
  • People have not become acknowledged as ‘subject matter experts’ as a result of the information they publish on their weblogs — people aren’t getting job offers, awards or recognition in the (other) media because of their blogs.
  • The publishing industry is churning out more ‘hard copy’ books and magazines than ever before, and it has not significantly changed its business model.
  • De facto networks of trust and reputation have not significantly changed because of weblogs — ask the vast majority of people who they trust, who they ask for advice, and where they look for advice, and you won’t hear bloggers and blogs mentioned.
  • The reason a lot of people go online is social — to connect with other people rather than to get information. And when they do look online for content rather than connection, what they’re looking for(music, health information and porn) is not a significant component of what’s on weblogs.

Many, probably most, blogs are either (a) channels to specialized non-weblog information (via hotlinks) — the vast majority of links in blog articles are not to other blogs, or (b) personal conversations among a small, close-knit group of people, on subjects of no lasting import. Despite the fact that blogs get high Google-rank on subjects they write about, this does not appear to be creating important or broad new audiences for bloggers — the average visitor to a blog stays around for only 90 seconds, and those that arrive via Google searches stay on average only a fraction of that time.

If a virus were to wipe out all traces of the blogosphere tomorrow, the sad truth is that most people wouldn’t care or even notice, and what people do and think wouldn’t significantly change. Maybe that’s why so many people think blogging is just a fad, something that will soon disappear and be forgotten. It’s not essential to anything.

Weblogs, like iPods, fill a want, not a need. It’s certainly possible for a want to evolve into a need, but I don’t think that’s happened with weblogs, yet. Any of three things might change that:

  1. A realization in the business community that weblogs enable simple creation and self-managed sharing of context-rich (and therefore highly valuable) information, something critical that traditional knowledge-sharing tools and repositories can’t offer;
  2. An evolution in the design and function of weblogs from a diary format to a content composition format, so that instead of a bunch of disjointed entries, the weblog would consist of ‘pieces’ of content (perhaps in many different media) that could be organized, combined, indexed, formatted and viewed in different ways to suit different users. Whereas now creating a book from entries in a weblog is cumbersome (and the result is not pretty), this additional content composition functionality would let publishers produce elegant e-books and e-magazines by simply ‘composing’ weblog articles together (the table of contents and index would be produced automatically). And educational curricula could likewise be developed and continuously updated by ‘composing’ pieces from various online sites (with appropriate permissioning) into a complete online course. These compositions could then be printed out for offline use, so your corner instant printer could become your instant hardcopy publisher.
  3. Some weblog tools could morph into full collaborate environments where groups of people with common interests, practices, projects or purposes could co-develop information and entertainment ‘products’. So-called ‘groupware’ has not been very successful largely because many groups lack sufficient shared passion, or a shared sense of urgency, or sufficient motivation to develop competence in using online tools. Co-development of a world-class compilation of ideas or expertise on a particular subject, or shared software or multimedia products (music, films, or books), on a shared space, would not suffer from this lack of motivation, and could produce collective wisdom and genius that is far more exciting than weblogs (even group blogs) can hope to offer. And there’s no reason why the tool to do this couldn’t be built on a blog + wiki platform, a composing environment that a lot of people have become comfortable with.

Any of these three possible evolutions of the lowly blog would, I think, change weblogs from being a tool for amateur hobbyists into a professional information management tool with powerful commercial application, a tool that fills a real need instead of just a want.

The more commonly-discussed evolution of blogs into multimedia sites that offer ‘programs’ instead of ‘posts’ would not, I would suggest, significantly increase the value or visibility of blogs — as YouTube has shown, you don’t need a blog to get a lot of attention for your video. And I think it’s naive to hope that most users of the mainstream media will ever get so disgusted with the lack of investigative reporting, courage, independence and quality of these media to take the time to look for something better in blogs — most readers are just not that discriminating, and don’t care that much about whether they’re getting the truth, or the whole story, or not.

Until one of the three evolutions above occurs, we’d be wise not to give up our day jobs or pin our egos to the success of our blogs. It’s getting harder and harder to find the good stuff in the ever-growing firehose of stuff in the blogosphere, and to get our voices heard.

When one of these evolutions occurs, then we’ll have a Most Significant Change to write about blogging. So far, however, what’s mostsignificant is how little has really changed.

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7 Responses to Weblogs — Why They’re Still Not ‘Happening’

  1. dave davison says:

    You wrote:”Any of these three possible evolutions of the lowly blog would, I think, change weblogs from being a tool for amateur hobbyists into a professional information management tool with powerful commercial application, a tool that fills a real need instead of just a want”.I vote for item #3. “full collaborate environments …to co-develop information or entertainment products.”Why don’t we collaborate to design and implement this tool – enough talk already. Let’s put together a taskonomy for this project. I am much more interested in the development of the tool you describe than I am in playing around with my blog – as much fun as it is- and as little as I presently care about it being read or responded to.my only blogging hope is to emerge as what Umair Haque calls a RECONSTRUCTOR. I am working on that. Interested?

  2. steve black says:

    Google has released collaborative documents, accessible via url, publishable to many formats including blogs.

  3. ‘Blogs fill the same need as newspaper columns; daily, known commentary. Some are more akin to gossip columns, other more akin to tech columns, but it’s the same idea: first-person (somebody we trust and who we sympathize with) accounts of things. Corporate blogs are boring because they don’t bring that “gossip” feeling (unless the author wants to get fired) and we know that they’re just advertising for a product — a lack of trust in the author. That’s why they never caught on. To have a successful ‘blog you need an author who a) can write (a tall order), b) can envince sympathy and support from an audience (another tall order) c) has something to say (even self-centred ramblings have to either draw a parallel to the reader’s own experience, or be funny, or be relevant). In short, blogging still follows the normal rules about what makes something popular, they aren’t a new paradigm in publishing, they’re the same old thing done in a new way, that’s all.

  4. NVMojo says:

    I know one thing for sure …the more Bushbots I meet, the more I find they have zero clue about what is going on, zero clue on asking questions about any conventional wisdom they imbibe, and hardly any read “blogs”. Go figure.

  5. adrian Chan says:

    in some ways the blogosphere is a reflection and observation of other media: it’s in this way that it’s a “conversation.” We live in an age in which our identity, as society, is produced by the mass media; the blogosphere produces commentary on that… If you were to erase it i think its absence would be felt pretty quickly and dramatically, and ironically, by those in the mass media who use it to monitor themselves! Turn off a social technology if you want to know what it does. It’s hard to see things changing while they’re changing, but the effects blogging and social media have on today’s production of information, news, values, markets, etc etc is profound, even if it’s indirect.

  6. Samuel Rose says:

    1. An evolution in the design and function of weblogs from a diary format to a content composition format, so that instead of a bunch of disjointed entries, the weblog would consist of ‘pieces’ of content (perhaps in many different media) that could be organized, combined, indexed, formatted and viewed in different ways to suit different users. Whereas now creating a book from entries in a weblog is cumbersome (and the result is not pretty), this additional content composition functionality would let publishers produce elegant e-books and e-magazines by simply ‘composing’ weblog articles together (the table of contents and index would be produced automatically). And educational curricula could likewise be developed and continuously updated by ‘composing’ pieces from various online sites (with appropriate permissioning) into a complete online course. These compositions could then be printed out for offline use, so your corner instant printer could become your instant hardcopy publisher.Done! See: http://webassistant.com TeleCommunity software. This software allows people to “blog” content into their Web Database (WebDB) and then re-use it in publications, like WebDesks, WebPresentations, WebTraining, etc. 1. Some weblog tools could morph into full collaborate environments where groups of people with common interests, practices, projects or purposes could co-develop information and entertainment ‘products’. So-called ‘groupware’ has not been very successful largely because many groups lack sufficient shared passion, or a shared sense of urgency, or sufficient motivation to develop competence in using online tools. Co-development of a world-class compilation of ideas or expertise on a particular subject, or shared software or multimedia products (music, films, or books), on a shared space, would not suffer from this lack of motivation, and could produce collective wisdom and genius that is far more exciting than weblogs (even group blogs) can hope to offer. And there’s no reason why the tool to do this couldn’t be built on a blog + wiki platform, a composing environment that a lot of people have become comfortable with.Done! See: http://www.communitywiki.org/odd/SocialSynergy/HomePage this is a powerful wiki engine (oddmuse) with blog functionality built in.Disclaimer: I am partnered with the WebAssistant company to sell WebAssistant software, and I am active in helping to develop OddMuse software.

  7. Dave Pollard says:

    Dave: The challenge isn’t designing a tool that meets these criteria, it’s getting it adopted by all the establish blog tools and the designers of corporate web tools.Renee: I think you’re right, but that has to change if blogs are to have any real future, I think.Adrian: I hope you’re right, but I don’t think blogging’s effect is that profound — perhaps that would change if it became more ubiquitous as a means of ‘conversing’ even in the absence of one of the three scenarios I outline in this article. But blogs are not really a very good conversational medium.Samuel: The market will be the ultimate judge, of course, but my sense is that webassistant is too complicated (“16 modules”) and most blikis are insufficiently intuitive to achieve widespread use. A step in the right direction, though.

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