DISQUS

Silverbrow · 1 year ago

I agree with you 100% when it comes to tech related blogs. But when you move out of the tech world into others, such as food - I write a food blog - and it's not quite the same. The mindset of the vast majority is still very much 1.0 and at the moment I can't see much chance of that changing.

Obviously tech bloggers are more able and interested in integrating and using the latest innovations, whether that's disqus, twitter or whatever, but others out there, who use the technology but aren't that interested in it are way behind. It may just be an issue of time lag, or it could be that they just don't get it/care all that much.

Phil · 1 year ago

This will open up the field to more people, especially (paradoxically) the less technically proficient. Outsiders, who can now use technologies that require less technical know-how, will be able to see more fully how to exploit the tools.

Will we even use the word "blooger" in a few years? Perhaps, but maybe not the way we do toady. I guess it depends on how much louder the noise gets and how much people care about the difference between noise and news.

calebelston · 1 year ago

To quote the great Bob Dylan, The times they are a changin'.

charlieanzman · 1 year ago

Louis - Nice wrap of Sunday's (fun!) dialog on Friendfeed and some of tonight's blog posts. I particularly like the way Duncan ended his piece.

Sean Hackbarth · 1 year ago

Odd that it's come to this point. With the plethora of social networks the key lesson is to go where your audience is. They're going to go there anyway, you might as well figure out where they are and talk to them.

gregory · 1 year ago

this is definitely what is happening ... one way i can tell, as soon as i went to a webdesigner here in india with a new idea for a blog, the idea got stolen, no big deal though, it is all coming frokmj the group mind

the unaddressed elephant in the room is the death of advertising as a revenue model .... it aint going to last....

Stephan · 1 year ago

Louis, good analysis, as always. I think it is important to understand why "bloggers 1.0" fear that change. Many bloggers have indeed complained that comments are now made outside of their blogs and control, and they'd like to find a way to easily aggregate these comments back to their blog. It is hard and time consuming to engage in conversations across the full spectrum of social media sites, so there's probably a wave to comment-aggregation tools that will come out way to fulfill that need.

david usher · 1 year ago

Hey Louis
Im with you, you cant stop the river. but i understand 1.0s position. Its way more fun to have 45 comments in one place than spread out all over the web. Since a lot of my readers are outside the social media world there is only so much conversation thats going to take place on twitter and friendfeeder for me. So instead i use twitter to update my status everywhere and tell them about new posts. Its far more important to me that my content is everywhere than trying control my readership.
(maybe im slow but still dont get friendfeeder, i just dont have the time to keep up with it:)

Rubin Sfadj · 1 year ago

I think most '1.0 Bloggers' are essentially worried about their ad revenues, because they can't see the opportunities in 'Blogging 2.0'.

To put it bluntly, you can make more money as a '2.0 Blogger', but you have to be willing to make the additional efforts.

Mark Evans · 1 year ago

Louis,

Another important consideration is that shift from Blogging 1.0 to Blogging 2.0 happened extremely quickly. It was one thing when people were reading RSS feeds but it's quite another when reading and the conversation started to happen in a multitude of places other than the original content source. It will be interesting see how/if bloggers who make money for a living can continue to be viable.

Mark

Louis Gray · 1 year ago

Despite the above, I'd almost hesitate to use the word "happened", with that tense. Instead, I'd say it's "happening", present tense. That's why you're seeing the angst as we're just now seeing that transition, and people in general hate transitions. It's interesting to see the issue of "fractured comments" come up almost on a daily basis, yet I thought we got that all cleared up __LAST__ month. :-)

JC · 1 year ago

Twitter is the blog, micro blogging, or just blogging without the noise. It is nuggets, wonderful nodes of comment and analysis.

Comments ARE Twitter. Twitter IS Blogging

manuscrypts · 1 year ago

it could be that the resistance to taking the conversation elsewhere is because of the fear of losing the conversation idea's ownership?

Roger · 1 year ago

Great post, thanks Louis. Twitter is a classic example of a disruptive technology, and those who built their websites around the earlier technology (blogging 1.0) are going to have to play catch up. It comes with the territory. As a biologist (and a blogger) I see evolutionary mechanisms at work. Quite simply, they who fail to adapt will die. Selective forces dictate that the most successful models will be those that offer the highest efficiency in terms of meeting needs. There may still be room for less efficient models. We will see some 1.0 bloggers remain, but they will be relegated to obscure branches of the evolutionary tree.

paul · 1 year ago

It's about Page Views, many blogs require three or four clicks before your comment goes live, so one view looks like four in the CPM chase.

gregory · 1 year ago

and i hate this, paul... i feel manipulated, and resent the time to click to the next page, and eff them, i stop reading .... example, sramana mitra, good mind, but greedy hungry, and i just wont go there anymore

Trevor Plantagenet · 1 year ago

Regardless of how long it takes for it to go live, people keep coming back to see if new comments have been added, that's why bloggers were incentivized to allow comments to begin with. If you recall, a lot of blogs didn't allow comments at first because of the grief that came with it. Eventually, the increased pageviews motivated everyone to take the risk.

I do seriously doubt that one can make as much money as a so-called "2.0 blogger" and you could a "1.0 blogger". You can't take more slices from a pie that isn't growing very much, which is what's happening when the existing attention is divided over more surface area.

gregory · 1 year ago

trevor, i agree, ads as revenue is over, it will be spread so thin that every blog will just be advertsing itself

Philipp Lenssen · 1 year ago

One important part of blogging I think is re-including feedback on posts though, either by updating the post or by letting it indirectly influence your future style of posts... so it would be neat to have good search capabilities on Friendfeed and others to search for e.g. [link:louisgray.com]. Furthermore, Friendfeed too should not care too much where their discussions are placed, so it would also be nice to have an RSS feed for such search which bloggers could then re-include to their blog in the form of a widget. (With some spam measures taken by Friendfeed so that it won't be abused too much, I suppose.)

The following result, which is also RSS-ified, seems to be a start but I'm not sure it's exactly like a "who comment on louisgray.com" list.
http://friendfeed.com/search?q=louisgray.com&se...

As for using an external comments system on a blog, that's everyone's decision where to store the data of their blog. One risk is that companies taking it away might one day abuse their hold on your data.

EricFriedman · 1 year ago

It would be great to have the ability to tie in your comment thread with my blog post. That will be a true benefit to having a comment system like disqus handling your comments.

Louis Gray · 1 year ago

The Inquisitr (Duncan Riley's site) is a perfect example of the right way to have that done. He's intelligently incorporated a plugin from FriendFeed for Wordpress, so that comments and other activity there feeds back to his blog. Another blog just starting to take a look at that is Mark Hopkins of Mashable is at http://www.rizzn.com/.

I don't have any insight into the future product development by FriendFeed or other sites like them, but I would expect tools like this to be built rapidly and deployed just as fast.

EricFriedman · 1 year ago

Definitely going to take a look at integrating Friendfeed into my WP site.
It looks like we are almost getting there, but there will have to be a
centralization happen with comment handlers. Kind of like an openID
system. I am happy that early adopters are making certain systems more
popular and innovating on the features "we" all want, but we have to make
sure it will translate to the everyday blogger.

charlieanzman · 1 year ago

Rizzn's implementation is particularly interesting. Something to watch

gregory · 1 year ago

see this fred wilson guy, http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/, he did this yesterday with valley insider, or some such...

Matt Shaulis · 1 year ago

The more the arguments echo into the ether the more stagnant and tired I find the whole "comment debate". I think the most important issue at hand is the least talked about. It is in plain English in the post above, however: "Every blogger in an industry covered the exact same stories".

Want to be a successful blogger? Be original. Stop copying those who are quicker to the news... TC, RWW, etc: these places have "sources" that feed them the hot news. If you don't have those sources, don't spit up their news. It's that simple. BE ORIGINAL!!! Go back through your last 90 days of posts. If 80% of them or more start with... "Today, [Fill in the name of a successful blog here] reports that..." then go ahead and call it quits. Not only for your own sake, but for ours too. (Then again... you could just dismiss the attribution from now on and possibly sell to Wired in the future.)

Alex Hammer · 1 year ago

The most influential bloggers, like Louis, and Duncan and Robert, and Michael (I bet even with first names many if not most of you know who each of these are - that says something of interest in and of itself) use their effecient processes and networks to QUICKLY aggregate, but even more importantly insightfully interpret, the noise of the blogosphere and the web.

We should pay them for this (and we do with our web traffic and links etc.)

Louis gets it. He has his finger clearly on the pulse of the major issues. And he is promoting and including and integrating many interesting and informative others, so the user can wade through it also oneself to draw one's own, and additional, conclusions.

Jennifer Van Grove · 1 year ago

Other than making it impossible to have one threaded conversation in one place, I don't really see the big deal about comments shifting to new locations. If people are taking about the content I create, that's a good thing, regardless of where it takes place. Yes I have less ability to sel ads (which I don't do) and yes it makes it more difficult to track, but I've found that new services are making it possible for more people to find me - think wom real-time blog referrals. Plus, if people comment via FF or Twitter, I can usually find it faster and respond quicker. It takes me 30 sec to respond to a DM or @reply, where as it might take me 5 min to go to my blog and respond in the comments. Essentially what I'm gaining is whole lot more than what I'm loosing.

patrickbyers · 1 year ago

I've struggled with this myself. You can say "comment here:" all you want. People will comment in the native app instead (which is fine).

Blogging 2.0 just requires more work on the blogger's part. Just like life, those that do the work will benefit most.

Patrick Byers
The Responsible Marketing Blog
http://responsiblemarketing.com

kf6nvr · 1 year ago

I think you, and a few others, have hit it on the head. If people are talking about your stuff, does it matter where? Newspapers never cared where people talked about their articles so long as they did. After all, there never was a way to directly poke a comment to an article on a newspaper (being a physical media that it was). If your stuff is talked about anywhere, ultimately people will show up at your site for more and your name/brand will get out there that much farther. That's truly a good thing.

gregory · 1 year ago

kf6, what you saty is true, but i think it is the surface of another truth, that our ideas are not ours... they never were, they come from what i will call group mind ... this tech decentralization is really just a more realistic model of reality....

Jose Paul Martin · 1 year ago

I used to say... Blogging is dead.... maybe I should rephrase that now... Blogging 1.0 is dead!

Sprague D · 1 year ago

Louis - I argue that the benefits to a blogger's brand may be marginal, but the loss of control of the conversation about their work could be significant. It's not clear, yet -- though you are a good example of how one can gain from participation in new social ag sites.

Ken Rosen · 1 year ago

A challenge of blogging 2.0 is that few bloggers--an potential bloggers--know what they don't know. Participating (or even having visibility to follow-on activity) in multiple channels requires using more tools. At least today. Not so many years ago, it would have taken research and training to make a website that allowed frequent additions, personalized graphics, and add-ons from search bars to blog rolls to comment options. Now those [blogging 1.0] features are automagic on a multitude of systems. Today, blogging 2.0 requires not just bravery and acceptance, but capability. Until the next bump in integrated blogging systems....

anaulin · 1 year ago

By definition, blogging is a personal, not-for-profit endeavor. The issues you talk about here (pageviews, comments on the site vs off the site, etc) are problems only for those that are trying to do some sort of online journalism, people that are trying to make money from their writing. Those are not bloggers; at least not in the traditional sense.

Michael Sherrin · 1 year ago

I really agree with letting users rule for the added reason that it doesn't matter how people read your blog or content, as long as they're reading it. Yes it's frustrating to not be able to easily track all the comments about your posts in once place, but the more people talk about you and your content, the more influence and value you have. This is the value free bloggers really want.

Luigi Centenaro · 1 year ago

Blogging 2.0 is good since good conversation across those social media sites:
1.attracts good visitors (really interested) to the author's Blog .
2.is great for Personal Branding.
3.is great for Business Blog (blog related to Companies or to Business site) and Brands in general.
4.is great for Blogs running affiliation: good visitors (as above) are likely to click on suggested products/services).

It's a matter giving to your readers a better experience on your "real" pages, a reason for visiting them.
Scoble and the others mentioned by Louis, are going into that direction.
If you think about it this is the real reason why comments run better on those social media services: they are much easier to write, follow, share and rate over there!

Using other Blogger content for engaging a conversation without their permission this is bad...
This is why they wrote CC, didn't they?
:)