Richard Morgan sent me this article, “Are Blogs Losing Their Authority To The Statusphere?” dated March 10th 2009, which argues that while blog authority ranking according to Technorati remains fairly static, the scores of the various blogs are declining. Technorati uses an inlist scoring algorithm which may be part of the problem, but it would seem to me that micro-blogging is impacting the strength of the voice of blogs as a communications tool, which is what the article argued. In some way’s not just micro-blogging, but the various places where people can and do record what they do and think. … When I started this blog 5 years ago, I chose to restrain what I put here but other media have grown in popularity, and so people’s ability to express themselves have grown. There is a diversification of publication sites which makes following people harder, although technorati only set out to capture blogs, not people, blogs seem no longer to be at the centre of how the internet records what people think. I know that I have been writing less frequently.

Internet messaging is built on a growing distributed architecture, consisting of

  • publication,
  • distribution,
  • aggregation and
  • consumption.

Different sites and technologies seek to perform and excel in different parts of the chain. The aggregation stage permits people to view people, if they permit it, or subject matter and most importantly control their own entry points to the mess that is today’s content, by which I mean choose to follow people of look for specific expertise. I think that authors should seek to co-operate with this consumer control of the reading process. It should be noted that the behaviour of individuals and corporations will differ. In particular most media companies want to capture the reader/viewer but individuals have no need to copy this behaviour. I try to post content and let people find it; I hope I have developed a reputation for expertise in some subjects over my career.

By keeping the architecture in mind, one can try and avoid annoying your readers, who, if one has any, are likely to be your friends. Bad habits I see are people who syndicate their tweets into facebook, so I, and others, get to know about their breakfast twice, and I am not a fan of syndicating one’s del.icio.us feed into blogs using the APIs. This latter habit annoys me because I don’t see the blog as an aggregation tool, but a publishing tool, and so I expect original work, of some description in people’s blogs. This can be even worse when people then publicise the blog, containing bookmarks using a micro blog. That’s three clicks to read something written by someone other than the person who’s views you’ve subscribed to, and if using a wireless device that’s a real pain. NB This is also true if you subscribe to Digg feeds, you get to ‘interesting’ content via the Digg page, so three clicks, three tabs or windows to read content you want. Another offence which I wish I could deal with more easily is the microblogging incontinent. The only way I have discovered how to deal with those, is to unsubscribe.

One can, and I do aggregate my feeds into one place. I originally created a personal planet, which aggregates some of the feeds I create. I have tried to create an everything feed at http://friendfeed.com/davelevy, which also has a nice key of the feeds I contribute to. This means that my readers can construct a feed that interests them. I know that some friends are interested in the technology, but not the politics. I commit the offence of subscribing my friend feed to face book, but I consider Facebook to be mainly a consumer. I need to think about this. Its not great, but I don’t syndicate my tweets directly to my face book statuses (sic), nor do I copy them back into friend feed. Managing my facebook feed is not easy and is compounded by Facebook’s desire to perform all roles in the architecture while being ‘open’. Its this openness which has enable site specialisation around, for instance, travel, books, restaurants and even at living social, iphone apps.

I suppose I am appealing for people to consider what tools they use to perform a specific role in the the personal content architecture. Don’t over aggregate, if people are interested in your thoughts they’ll find them. Don’t shove it down their throats.

When I first considered writing this little essay, it seemed interesting to consider, “Is the status-sphere replacing blogs?”, others including Tim Bray have written about this since and argue Not. I hope that the evolution of easy micro-blogging, will free blogs to become deeper and more interesting. I know that I have produced less frequent blog article since I took up with Twitter, but I also considered my del.icio.us feed, to be a microblog of sorts. Another key development is that the use of sites like del.icio.us has turned in-list search ranking from a vote of web authors, where you needed the technology skills and resource to have a web page in order to influence the sort order, into a vote of web readers and authors. The ease of micro blog adoption means that an even large crowd should now be participating in the construction of in list search orders. I am unsure how url shortner’s impact the search engines in-list calculations. They make it harder, I ‘m sure, as does the fact there’s more than one. Many argue that Twitter’s best value is as a search engine and that it, and other micro-blogging systems won’t replace blogs because there are too many subjects that can’t be accurately discussed in 140, characters. Techcrunch published further thoughts on twitter, and it chances of supplanting the blogs, however it takes less time to tweet, rubbish gets lost easier, and twitter in particular is designed to be used by handheld devices. (I don’t think I’d like to have written this on my new Nokia 5800, or even my ipodtouch.) It should be noted, that while its very easy to create a 140 character message, it should be easy to create a podcast or even a video, but its not. They are both difficult to create, especially if you don’t just record a chat amongst friends but try and ‘deliver/perform’ a report. This is a skills issue. They wouldn’t pay Steven Fry all that money to make audio books if it was easy.

One final thought is that communitarian aggregation is not well done at the moment. One of the strength’s of Peter Reiser’s approach, ‘Community Equity’, to knowledge management systems that at its heart is a personal rating engine. (See also http://socialadoption.com/ They don’t yet have this as truly n-dimensional, which I think is needed, so you can rate your own content, rate other author’s expertise, rate & describe their interest to you. I may play with a Google App or Zembly, to experiment with some of how to make some of this work. A very rich inter-personal network with sophisitcated popular and machine calculated relevance scoring is something that can add value. Content could flow through your colleagues votes moving closer and further away from your viewing window and your friends and colleagues advice and hints would influence or determine what you find. Google reader’s share facility is quite close, but there’s only one dimension, you can have friends, and they can recommend stuff for you to read. (I think more can be done.)

I hint that one of Technorati’s problems is its reliance on in-list. Searching the Workplace Web, written by Fagin, Kumar and McCurley, which I commented on, on this blog in an article called, The Shape of Internet, write about a number of relevance and ordering tests that could be used and specifically argue that within the corporate intranet other sorts and relevance tests may be more appropriate to help solve a number of questions such as authority. They also argue that intranet URL naming is less search friendly and it is clear that the dissipation of people’s voice and advice over multiple sites with different naming conventions, often using surrogates or numbers and URL shortners means that the internet is catching up on the early intranet in the chaos of name space. It may be time to review in-list and begin to weight votes for relevance and sort-order.

Are blogs losing their relevance, maybe, maybe not. Well written opinions by disinterested experts will always be valued. As the dross moves to the micro-blogs, this may liberate the blogs to re-establish themselves as clear voices of expertise. Some of what was observed Richard’s post to me may be failures in Technorati, its initial insights are aged and its being out innovated.

ooOOOoo

Copied from the old Oracle blog on 4th Dec 2014, parts of the article are now more accurate as internet history rather than an analysis and forecast, I got some things right, some things wrong and missed others altogether.

Are blogs losing their infuence?
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