In Praise of Likes. And Blogging.
Fred likes liking. I do, too. “Liking” is a feature of the Disqus comment software we use on this blog. Clicking the “Like” button next to a comment earns the commenter a positive reputation point on Disqus and helps other readers discover popular comments. Fred says:
I often reply to a comment that I like without adding anything to the discussion just to signal that I liked it…I’d like to encourage everyone who wades into the comments to start doing this as well. Many of you call yourself “lurkers” who don’t like to comment. But if you like to read the comments, then please get a disqus profile and start liking. Every bit of engagement, every bit of social signaling makes this community better and stronger.
I’d like to extend that same invitation here to TMV readers. I read every comment on my posts (only skim the redundant ones) and I learn from all of them. As the designated tech blogger, my posts don’t often attract the most comments. So please chime in if you have an opinion on anything I write!
I’ve had some further thoughts on blogging since my Blogging Gets Old look at the Pew study on Social Media and Young Adults the other day. It’s not surprising that young people don’t blog. Newer tools like Facebook and Twitter have emerged, 
ideally suited to enable audience engagement to occur in quicker and easier ways.
A good blogger, even when just quoting someone else, must carefully choose what to excerpt, which words to link, what else to link to, what text shows on the front page, whether to include an image. All of those are authorial choices manually done and each takes time.
Blogging, Tweeting and Status Updates on Facebook are all three about engagement. Each of the different tools works in a different way. And each is optimized for a different kind of audience engagement. Blogging is the long-form; Facebook is wonderfully designed for conversation with friends; Twitter enables commentary with far less effort than blogging.
Danah Boyd’s thoughts on Twitter vs. Facebook Status Updates helps to further clarify the definitions:
Those using Facebook are primarily concerned with connecting with those that they know (or knew in high school). The status updates are an invitation to conversation, a way of maintaining social peripheral awareness among friends and acquaintances. They’re about revealing life as it happens so as to be part of a “keeping up” community.
Arguably, Twitter began this way, if only because the geeks and bloggers who were among the early adopters were a socially cohesive group. Yet, as the site has matured, the practices have changed (and I’ve watched a whole lot of early adopters who weren’t part of the professional cohort leave). For the most visible, Twitter is a way of producing identity in a public setting.
I would do more of both (though doing all three is hardly the norm outside of geekdom and journalism) but I have had trouble finding my voice on those newer platforms. For now, blogging is my habit, my practice; here I know my voice. I am a consumer of tweets and updates; a producer of blog posts.
To the conversation on why people have left blogging in favor of Tweets and Facebook, I’d add another significant change. Unmentioned in the Pew poll, the shift has occurred in just the past couple years: Where once the NYTimes, WaPo and the rest of the traditional media outlets would quote from, or link to, independent blogs, now each has dozens of blogs authored by paid journalists of their own.
With the influx of journalists, blogs have largely become professionalized platforms for the practice of paid journalism. While journalism is richer for it, the jury is still out on the impact this change has had on the blogosphere. Sarah Boxer, writing in The New York Review of Books from the crest of the old blogosphere’s influence:
Bloggers are golden when they’re at the bottom of the heap, kicking up. Give them a salary, a book contract, or a press credential, though, and it just isn’t the same. (And this includes, for the most part, the blogs set up by magazines, companies, and newspapers.) Why? When you write for pay, you worry about lawsuits, sentence structure, and word choice. You worry about your boss, your publisher, your mother, and your superego looking over your shoulder. And that’s no way to blog.
The idiosyncratic individual voice — the one-person pundit shows with their strident vitriolic looniness, careless typos, purposeful misspellings, absent (or rampant) punctuation, odd locutions and ever-present Wikipedia links — will not go away. Those independent voices who remain continue to play an important role in keeping the blogosphere vital.
As the blogger has become more mainstream and professional, the standards and expectations of readers have changed as well. So while It’s not impossible to be the lone blogger anymore, it’s harder to become one now, because for the most part, their time has passed.
20 Responses to “In Praise of Likes. And Blogging.”
dear Joe, i suggest you do a piece on Hot Moderate Voice Bloggers. . . maybe comments would pour in if Bloggers got “sexy”. . .
Hot Organic Farmers. . .
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/13/hot-or…
Hot Beekeepers. . .
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/26/hot-be…
The Social media sites are such fluff. . .i hope just because the younger ones with “sound bite brains” are not the ones to determine the future of blogging. You guys just need to get a little “sexy”, in a wholesome way,. . . the bees do it. . .
I LIKED your comment. And the suggestion. But don't you mean we should do a piece on Hot TMV Commenters?
Good ideas Joe. If we all expressed our appreciation for articles that we agreed with; and respect for the well written articles that we may not agree with we would all foster more civility at TMV. More civility more thoughtful debates and blogs.
I like the blogs and but haven't felt the necessity to Tweet as of yet. It seems to me that Twitter is a place for hard core tech addicts. Kind of like someone main lining heroin you really have to have a Jones going to cross that line.
I'd love to know what a VC is.
Sure Kathy! A VC is a venture capitalist. From Wikipedia (of course):
“Fred” is Fred Wilson. From Wikipedia (again, of course):
Neat post, Joe.
I liked it, and–for a change–I like every comment, so far, and have clicked “Like” accordingly on all of them (and when Disqus lets me, I'll “Like” my comment, too.)
Keept it up.
Dorian
Oh, okay. Thanks, Joe.
So, being negative, in a hypothetical way. What about a Not Like button if one can't be bothered replying to silly or way out post like mine?
There, I just gave everyone a like. Even you duck.
So… what did I win?
Hey Joe. Me again. You seem the right person to give me/us some insight or look into the following.
A few days ago, I noticed that the first person who liked a comment was identified by his or her DISQUS name. After the first “Like”, it just reported 1 more, 2 more etc.
This only lasted for a day.
I am curious:
1. Was this some kind of trial?
2. What effect would identifying (at least) the first “Like” have on readers expressing their “Likes” knowing they would be identified. Have you seen any “research” on this?
Thanks
Dorian
You saw that too! I didn't know if it went away because of a technical issue, or if they wanted to encourage “lurkers” to be “likers” by keeping them anonymous.
“Are you a leftie?”
Hot Organic Farmers. . .
Hot Beekeepers. . .
DLS: [and I said] “Ma'am, I am, tonight!”
Glad somebody else noticed. I wasn't sure if I had been dreaming it…
Actually DLS before reading Joe's article chanced on the blog of the Hot Organic Farmers and Hot Beekeepers. Normally the “hotties” do not draw my eyes but these two groups were so outside of the usual hotties the mental frame of how the world is “suppose to be” loosened. DLS i am sure if you volunteer to be the first Hot Commenter for TMV that would truly be a mental frame breaker. . .
But then the far Right is SO much more passionate and steamy than us cool, calm, collective lefties. . .lol!
“DLS i am sure if you volunteer to be the first Hot Commenter for TMV that would truly be a mental frame breaker. . .”
I fear I'd just be blamed for a spike in health care costs.
Hey Dorian, I don't know the answer. What's worse, I tried to find the answer in the Disqus knowledge base, no luck. Then I tried to put in a ticket, it wouldn't take it. Either the ticket software is down or it doesn't support Macs. I tried with 3 browsers!
Thanks for trying, Joe. Sooner ort later we may have some answers.
Dorian
I just pushed the NOT LIKE button, Disqus.
I've just clicked “like” on every comment. I don't think blogs are a thing of the past, at least not in the Lehigh Valley, Pa. I started a small poliblog there a few years ago, devoted mostly to the local stuff, and it has grown every year to the point where I now have around 1400 readers per day on weekdays. This is quite small, to be sure, but is much higher than the twenty or thirty when I started. At election time, readership easily doubles. The blog provides details you just don't see in trhe papers, like campaign finance reports and video excerpts of public meetings, and readership has consistently grown. Facebook could do the same thing, true, but only with an audience of people that I know and approve. Abot the best thing twitter could do is provide a link to my blog.
I've noticed that the number of poliblogs (and other blogs) in this area is rapidly increasing, so the death knell you sound may be premature.
As far as DISQUS is concerned, I love it, but my readers seem not to like it. On Blogger, where I allow anyone to comment and they are unmoderated, I do get trolls, but also get lots of good comments and tips. I've loaded DISQUS recently to try to control the trolls, but notice people are far less likely to comment. Sure, it scares the trolls away, but I hate that email notification is usually always delayed and it takes longer to load.
hi there Bernie O'Hare
re disqus and your site. Dont know if you are IT or Dev, but if you go deeper into disqus screens and join up the developers and IT guys who continue to parse this comments software, you'll see other aspects of Disqus that are for those guys who are developing the sw. Here at TMV, I'd say Disqus works 'most often,' quite perfectly for the large amount of readers and commenters we have hourly. There are occasional glitches. But thus far, Disqus has been better than what we used before which also required more from each commenter in terms of registration, etc.
just a .02
dr.e
deputy managing editor, TMV