Conversation platforms will make blogs increasingly redundant
There are many reasons why people blog. Some, like mine, are experiments in self-expression and a historical log of experiences, opinions and discoveries of personal interest. They’re (primarily text-based) pedestals for the development of a digital ‘sculpture’ of your identity. Visitors are attracted both to explore your unique identity and points of view, and to read and participate in the conversations your posts have sparked.
Communities are environments that foster identities. This happens when you abandon anonymity and let people associate your comments (conversational inputs) with a name that they can become familiar with. The easier it is for people to associate your previous comments with your current one, the easier it is for them to understand where you’re coming from, who you are. Identity is all about adding context to your actions. There are lots of other ways of adding context: an avatar (or even a real photo of you); even broader identity context like your facebook profile, a link to your homepage, to other places you’re active – Twitter, other sites, etc.
What Disqus, IntenseDebate, MyBlogLog, SezWho etc do is provide a really compelling, web-wide context to your actions on a site: e.g. when I comment here, you can follow a link to my Disqus profile that lists my comments everywhere else that uses Disqus. I got a lot of people pulling the RSS feed from that page last week as people want to track my conversations (actions) around the web, not just on one site. So an important aspect of what Disqus does is to create a portable identity.
Death of the blog as an identity pedestal
My argument is that this will, over time, make my blog largely redundant as a pedestal of personal identity. It used to be (still is, largely) that everyone provided their own input to a story on their own blog; conversations were on the intra-blog (blog to blog) level. It used to be the only place; but now my Disqus page might become as powerful a central pedestal of my identity as my own blog, and could replace it. If people start building their identities within the conversations created on other peoples’ blogs (i.e. as symbiotic parasites) the blog dies as a pedestal, and the focus of attention is on conversations, not blog posts (i.e. Techmeme and Technorati miss all the interesting content of the ‘conversation-sphere’); the social magnet conclusively shifts from my blog posts, to the conversations I spark.
Conversations as social magnets.
It is abundantly clear that conversations can be social magnets (alternately called social objects), just as photos are on Flickr (and are on Facebook, as is the minifeed), music is on Imeem and MySpace, etc. Social objects bring people to a site and catalyse communities and social networks. Conversations, when they’re open, are incredibly magnetic: Twitter is one example, as are forums, like the ones I used to run. The largest forum in the world has 12 million members. So my thesis is this: could an entirely new social network be created, the next Flickr/Facebook/MySpace, with aggregated conversations as the social magnet?
Birth of a web-wide forum [Death of your blog as the environment where I access the social magnet (conversations)]
Crucially, these conversations don’t even need to happen on your blog – they can happen within Disqus itself. I call this a ‘web-wide-forum’ since unlike traditional forums, the conversation threads come from all over the web. Even though the threads initially spark on blogs, I might as well just use Disqus as my go-to site (not your blog) to find conversations to contribute to, and do it there.
Disqus ends up killing my blog (because it’s a new & better pedestal for my identity) and yours (because your audience gets easier access to the social magnet – conversations – via Disqus, than via your blog).
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My blog, at the moment, still has unique features Disqus doesn’t, but I could imagine could do in future
- Multimedia (ability to post videos, images, etc)
- Ability to create topics (whereas if I comment on someone’s story, they’ve set the agenda) – still a reliance on blogs to reate conversations. The transformation of Disqus into a more forum-like service will need to see it becoming more like either a traditional forum, or a blog-hosting platform like Wordpress.com. Thinking strategically, if I were either of them, I’d be seeking to merge with the other. This would see the blogosphere turned inside-out: conversation-up not blogpost-down
- SEO and analytics – people can at the moment more easily find my actions when they’re on my blog, and I can see who’s visiting my “identity pedestal”
It doesn’t have the following benefit of Disqus as a pedestal distributed amongst many sites:
- There are benefits to your identity being visible and being noticed. What I say here goes unnoticed because nobody’s here – what I happened to say on Fred Wilson’s blog, which gets much more traffic, got picked up on. Thinking like a parasite, you go for where audiences are, instead of trying to bring them here (I had no such intention in my mind at the time, or any other time I comment on someone’s site! But that accidental exposure I got there is evidence of how true it is, that you get different effects from placing your identity pedestal in high-profile and low-profile places.
Related:
- The Chinese, by any other name…
- We were surprised to learn, during our month in China, that many bright young things there have a Western name as well as their given Chinese name. They ran the gamut – obvious ones (Zhu Li > Julie), action heroes (Bruce…), to amusingly random (names that would befit a 50’s Holywood starlet, not a trendy [...]...
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