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.