Online Media Cultist

Here’s my new thinking: probably the best and most successful bloggers will also tend to be the best blogger/microblogger hybrids, and vice versa.

Now let me explain.

Over the summer I wrote several pieces about this emerging idea called Blogging 2.0. My sense at the time was that successful bloggers (more on how to define this below) would need to continue to churn out valuable content, network effectively in their space, get linked by high quality websites, and so forth, but would also need to engage in the emerging social media space, on red hot communications platforms such as Twitter, FriendFeed, and Disqus.

In Blogging 2.0: from surviving to thriving, I wrote:

My sense is that there’s a galaxy of well intentioned and ambitious bloggers out there who are and will be trying to figure out how to find their way in this new and strange era of distributed conversations (i.e. you spend the time, brain power, expertise, and hard work to create and share a new idea on your blog and it ends up being discussed in any number of other places).

…successful Bloggers 2.0 need to dive headlong into the places where eyeballs are and conversations are being held. The idea is to make friends, share ideas, and above all else promote one’s personal brand with the hope that people will eventually find their way back to your blog. It’s “old fashioned” online promotion – make friends, show that you’re smart and have something to share, and the people will hopefully follow.

So my overriding theory was that activities outside of the “home blog” should hopefully in the end lead to increased activity and participation back on the home site.

Now we’re hitting the end of the year. Social media participation and engagement is more intense than ever, drawing time and attention spans ever further away from these very home sites, and that’s not really even touching on the “distributed conversation” side of things!

The basic question that I’m left with these days is a somewhat existential one I suppose: can participation on social media sites become its own good?

Or in slightly less lofty terms: can successful bloggers evolve into some sort of successful blogger/microblogger hybrid? In specific terms, this means less posts and less words and less engagement on home sites in favor of relatively more of all of that on social media and microblogging platforms.

My sense is that yes they can, and yes, they will probably have to in this quickly evolving environment.

To quote myself on Twitter today:

Meaning that from now on *probably* the best bloggers will also tend to be the best microbloggers/social media publishers, and vice versa

Now, back to the definition of “successful blogger” for just a second. Obviously this can mean many different things. If it means making money, the new blogger/microblogger hybrid will change the equation some. I’m particularly fascinated at the moment with advertising services (such as Magpie for Twitter and Adjix for link shrinking) that seek to bring revenue directly to social media participants. This industry niche is extremely new though and is struggling with initial resistance from purists even as start-ups in the space figure out their own business models. But the tremendous movement in the overarching social media space will surely bring more players, more competition, and innovation.

Aside from the money part, success may mean things like learning opportunities, personal branding, product/service promotion, networking, and all round high fun and online conversatin’. All of these things seem to play into the blogging/microblogging hybrid model extremely well.

All of that said, I wouldn’t be surprised to have substantially evolved (or you can say changed, perhaps!) opinions about this topic in a few months. That’s how quickly things are moving.

Mathew Ingram, riffing on a Fred Wilson post, talks about the notion of bloggers getting “paid” via comments. In essence, comments are held up as part of the value to a blog/website and to the web publishers that run them.

Ingram notes that “It would be nice to think that the sheer joy of crafting an awesome blog post was enough, but some feedback is nice too.” The web of course and blogs in particular are ideally suited for feedback and interaction between publishers and readers. And the vast majority of bloggers are not entirely altruistic: they want comments, they want page views, and most would also love to get paid as part of the overall bargain.

A larger issue that has been widely debated over the last few months is what happens when an idea is introduced and conversation started on one website – the “home” or original source of its value in a sense – and then continued elsewhere. Somewhat complex questions are introduced: does the publisher deserve “credit” for introducing the idea / story / conversation (and how is it issued)? How do bloggers cope with “original” conversations taking place offsite? And how can bloggers/web publishers keep track of how people are responding and continue to add value to their own “brand”?

My personal take is that content aggregators and communications platforms – like Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, and Readburner – are actually useful marketing platforms for bloggers. In other words, participation on these platforms can help increase the value of one’s own website (in terms of comments and especially page views and repeat visitors that ultimately drive the bottom line of the online publishing economy). However, I draw a hard line on Shyftr, a site that pulls the entire full text RSS feed away from publishers and creates community around it. That deflates the marketing opportunity and value proposition between publishers and new audiences.

Even much discussed services like Disqus and the red hot FriendFeed have their problems. Ingram smartly notes in the comments section of his piece:

I have to say that’s one of my main peeves with FriendFeed, actually — every time someone shares something from Google Reader, or posts it to Twitter or shares it in some other way, it becomes a new instance of that item and comments aggregate in different places. I wish FF
could pull those items together.

Therefore, “distributed conversations” can run away from themselves, and ultimately dilute the value of the original publisher or “conversation instigator” as well as the total value of the conversation itself. FriendFeed – which has been heralded by some as the one aggregator to rule them all – has not solved and some way perpetuates this potential dilemma.

As FriendFeed continues to develop, it will likely pick off the best features of other RSS-based services like Readburner and RSSMeme. An example would be to display to users how many people have shared a Google Reader story within the FriendFeed ecosystem and display the total of the comments around that link.

So I believe that the bloggers and web publishers who embrace this Brave New World of distributed conversations can reap benefits for it. And I believe that new tools and features will emerge that will help to manage and track distributed conversations, increasing value for publishers and conversation participants alike. It just may take some time to get there!

I’ve noticed that much of the discussion of this new notion of Blogging 2.0 revolves around what users want. In fact, as I noted earlier this week, Duncan Riley declared that Blogging 2.0 is “all about the user.” Fair enough.

That said, my sense is that there’s a galaxy of well intentioned and ambitious bloggers out there who are and will be trying to figure out how to find their way in this new and strange era of distributed conversations (i.e. you spend the time, brain power, expertise, and hard work to create and share a new idea on your blog and it ends up being discussed in any number of other places).

It’s a question of finding the opportunity in the challenge, which I started to get into in a piece called Bridging the Blogging 1.0 and Blogging 2.0 divide. In my view, bloggers can be successful from a Blogging 1.0 vantage point (page views, RSS subscribers, comments, advertising revenue) by embracing the Blogging 2.0 environment.

That’s fantastic, you say, but what the hell does that mean?

It means that successful Bloggers 2.0 need to dive headlong into the places where eyeballs are and conversations are being held. The idea is to make friends, share ideas, and above all else promote one’s personal brand with the hope that people will eventually find their way back to your blog. It’s “old fashioned” online promotion – make friends, show that you’re smart and have something to share, and the people will hopefully follow.

This topic also led me to think about Blogging 2.0 tools from the blogger perspective. I mused on a WinExtra piece called Evangelizing is hard work (and it is, let there be no doubt!) that “I think that this need created by the complex environment that you’ve described will demand new means for publishers to promote themselves.”

That said, here’s a slate of some current popular means that bloggers can use to engage Blogging 2.0 with an eye toward driving the bottom line:

* Disqus - This is a good one to start with as it’s a comments plug-in system that exists right on your blog. So when people leave a comment on your site, those comments are also “cross-published” to the Disqus community. Further, all of your comments made around the Internet on other sites that use Disqus are stored for you in one place.

I installed Disqus here on Online Media Cultist a few weeks ago and like it for the most part, but one major qualm I have is that it’s difficult to tell which site commenters hail from (this should be one-click away). I’m also not convinced as yet that Disqus is an effective promotional tool overall beyond traditional commenting.

* Twitter - Beyond being the preeminent “smart people network,” Twitter is a wonderful place to see and be seen, or tweet and friend and follow in Twitter parlance. It’s a wonderful and flexible and powerful platform, built on a vibrant community of influential-types, bloggers, techies, geeks and, increasingly, everyone. Now if only it didn’t crash so often.

* Friendfeed - Friendfeed may be the perfect example of Blogging 2.0, a “lifestreaming” aggregator that facilitates conversation and provides social networking opportunities around a bevy of writing, link sharing, and media uploading that you’re doing around the Internet. It also works symbiotically for bloggers, in my view: the more you blog, the more you tweet, and the more you share, the more you show up on Friendfeed, the more likely you are to attract conversations around your ideas and, ideally, those click back visits that you’re hoping for.

* Facebook - I’m not a big Facebook user, but some bloggers utilize it as a promotional outpost for their sites. It has a Twitter-like “status” service, which in conjunction with typical comments and the horde of Facebook apps makes it a place for distributed conversations to take place and potentially take advantage of.

* Google Reader - Increasingly, what we can share is becoming important in addition to the new ideas and perspective we bring to the mix. Google Reader is significant in the RSS world as its shared stories feature ties into other services like the aforementioned Friendfeed as well as Readburner. So in essence we can add “sharing” as an important piece of participating in Blogging 2.0.

* MyBlogLog - I was extremely excited about MBL in 2007 as a blog promotion tool and blogger-centric social network, but that excitement was fleeting and transitioned to near-apathy over time as I didn’t find significant reasons to stick around the MBL community or ways to connect with other bloggers. Still, the MBL widget remains a nice way to get a visual (or at least an icon) on who is visiting your site. There’s also been a nice amount of chatter about recently added features, which I’ve been meaning to investigate for some time now. The bottom line is that there’s no better way to promote your blog than amongst an audience of likeminded bloggers, so MyBlogLog has an opportunity to be a place where people can do that.

As I mentioned briefly above, I do think there’s a growing need for tools that will help bloggers to harness the activity going on in all of these disparate places. Disqus and Friendfeed go a ways toward doing that, but I sense that we’ll see a lot more activity in this space over the next year or two.

I added the Disqus comments plug-in to Online Media Cultist last night. I hope it provides value for everyone who is kind enough to leave comments. For a few anxious moments I thought I’d managed to lose all of comments made here since March of last year, but managed to resurrect them soon enough.

Please let me know what you think, if you like it or hate it, and anything else you’d like to see here at the OMC. The one downside I’m looking at from the start is the fact that e-mail notification of new comments to posts that you’ve commented on is not a default option. In my view, that’s one of the best ways to easily and efficiently rejoin conversations that you’ve already taken the time and energy to join.

However, I hope the upsides of Disqus outweigh that one minor note. It’s also pretty cool that Friendfeed aggregates Disqus comments. The Friendfeed-Disqus combination alone could become a mightily powerful force, a piece of a larger story I published a little while ago.

Almost everyday, I’ll read something on the web that refers to another website, online service, or application that makes me think: I need to check that out when I get a chance.

Thought it might sense to roll out a semi-regular column where I take a look at these sites. Hopefully the idea will be to spread the word on cool but not massively well known things going on in the interwebs, while providing a quick cheat sheet of sorts.

* Disqus - “Turn your blog comments into a webwide discussion.”

I’ve noticed a lot of bloggers talking about and using Disqus over the past few months. The main idea seems to be that you install Disqus on your blog, which then allows commenters to display a profile pic and also provides threaded conversations (you can reply to a specific comment, which is indented underneath the comment you’re replying to). Disqus also provides e-mail and mobile posting, which is pretty cool.

Disqus aggregates all of the comments that you’ve made across the Internet on sites that have Disqus installed on a standalone profile page. This is a step forward in centralizing conversations, but I have a hard time seeing this as a killer feature except for those people who comment avidly and often but don’t necessarily have their own blog or website as a homebase.

Comment ratings and the ability create a Top Commenters widget may be the best aspects of this service. I may need to get Disqus installed on Online Media Cultist one of these day.

* Plaxo - “Stay in touch with people you care about.”

It’s a little bit difficult to tell exactly what Plaxo is straight away, which is not a good sign. However, delving in a little bit, it appears to be a social networking site with a strong emphasis on media sharing (you can tie in a bevy of “websites I use” from photo sharing, social networking, and blogging/microblogging categories). The address book and calendar features also look particularly strong.

My overall impression is that this is a social networking site for grownups, heavy on the business contacts and photo-sharing, light on the flirting and profile customization.

* LinkRiver - “Share and Discover the Best of the Web.”

There’s no big mystery to what LinkRiver is about; you know right away that you’re going to get links to lots and lots of stuff. A helpful explanation at the top of the page tells us that “A user’s river contains all links shared by that user AND all links shared by users followed by that user.”

Looking at the list of “Follows,” it seems obvious that LinkRiver wants to be a source for the best links on the web, provided by thought leaders and top bloggers.

So I suppose that LinkRiver is in some ways a competitor to Techmeme, a different slice on how the top news of the day is organized, aggregated, and presented.

* Diigo - “Diigo is a powerful research tool and a knowledge-sharing community”

My quick take on Diigo is that it combines a browser plug-in that allows you to highlight portions of text on webpages with a social networking community focused on the highlighting/social bookmarking activity. Diigo pitches itself as a “collaborative research platform” that can help to “improve your research productivity.” That really makes sense if you think about it like studying for a college exam with thousands of other people highlighting portions of text books for you.

* fav.or.it - An “RSS reader for the masses.”

While I’ve been a strong supporter of RSS readers for years, of late I’ve been musing whether services like Techmeme combined with Twitter or Friendfeed may be more efficient in “bringing the news to you.” Fav.or.it claims that it “contains 1000’s of RSS feeds and with our slice system you can cut the web up into your own readable chunks.”

We also know that fav.or.it “is a unique product that not only allows you to aggregate content like a newsreader but also allows you to post comments, all without leaving its site.”

I was not able to register for the site as it’s still in private beta. My big question is whether fav.or.it will offer full text RSS feeds to its community along with commenting and other media-sharing features. If it does, that’s a huge red flag for me, as I’ve noted in a few recent stories looking at Shyftr.