Online Media Cultist

Ah, there’s another “2.0″ to throw into the mix, everyone! Blogging 2.0 is now a part of our lexicon, thanks (I believe) to Duncan Riley, late of TechCrunch and now of a new operation called The Inquisitr.

Louis Gray breaks it down as follows:

Blogging 1.0 centered around who could:

* Amass the most page views
* Display the most ads
* Get the most comments
* Attract the most RSS subscribers

But then came along some inconvenient wrinkles to the mix:

* Full RSS feeds took page views away from the blog
* Readers installed ad filters, and didn’t click
* Comments started to live elsewhere
* Every blogger in an industry covered the exact same stories

Louis concludes that in order to be “successful” – a subjective term to be sure – bloggers must worry “less about where the conversation is taking place, but more about whether it’s taking place at all.”

I agree… to an extent.

I think that for most serious bloggers (another subjective term!), the game is to take part in the great Internet conversation, to add something unique and valuable to the mix, and to create a “destination presence” of some sort. The metrics for success around this may vary but essentially boil down to unique visits, page views, ad clicks, RSS readers, and comments. All the basics that are now being dubbed Blogging 1.0.

So even in a Blogging 2.0 world – a world where conversations started in one place are taking place in many others – I don’t see any change to this basic objective. Unless you’re the Mother Teresa of blogging, there’s always some self-serving interest to online publishing, whether it be the pride and satisfaction of adding value to the whole, or more earthly interests like accruing traffic numbers and the advertising revenue that can be driven from it.

Therefore, I believe that web publishers can think Blogging 1.0 while acting Blogging 2.0, so to speak. Engaging in services like Twitter, Friendfeed, and Readburner are great ways to join the new “distributed conversation” while promoting your destination home site, to get PR/advertising-ish for a moment. This in essence is very Blogging 1.0 as well: in order to get traffic you need to get out there, make friends, leave comments around the web, network, guest post, and other basic blogging promotion techniques.

So I think it’s important to remember that there’s some inherent self-interest for the vast majority of bloggers and web publishers. But that self-interest should drive participation in these new social media platforms. As I’ve written in the past, that’s why I draw the line on services like Shyftr, which pull full text feeds from publishers without permission and create conversations around it. That in my view goes past “what users want” and violates publishers’ core interests/self-interests.

Colin Walker says it perfectly: “Engaging in the conversation and being willing to takes those steps necessary will enhance the reputation of any blogger willing to put themselves out there which in turn lead to the secondary benefits we all go on about.”

Mark Evans worries about a potential chilling effect of Blogging 2.0 on professional full-time bloggers, musing that “if this landscape existed a few years ago, people such as such Om Malik, Richard MacManus, Darren Rowse (aka Problogger) or Andrew Sullivan would never have been able to become pro bloggers.”

I disagree – I think that today, even with a great deal of competition and new and complicating communications platforms, it’s as great a time as any to hop into the blogging game. Riley’s new venture is a perfect example: a strong writer with strong opinions (and connections and name recognition never hurt!) has an opportunity to find success in this new brave Blogging 1.0/2.0 landscape.

Finally, Duncan Riley says Blogging 2.0 is “all about the user.” My take is that by serving the user, bloggers can at the same time serve themselves.

I’ve written a few stories about Shyftr over the last week. In short, Shyftr pulls full text RSS feeds published by websites and creates community around them on its own website. Although they’ve changed how the site works (in part due to an innocent question I asked on Twitter over the weekend, which set off quite a little debate throughout the blogospheric realm) the fundamental problem remains: you can read full text stories on Shyftr and comment on those stories on Shyftr without ever visiting the original publishing source. Some people disagree with this position, but in my view that fundamentally interferes with a publisher’s ability to interact with readers and the ability to create community around the original publishing source.

Last night, I discovered ReadBurner, a site which I believe does things in exactly the right way. ReadBurner takes stories that are being shared on Google Reader and provides a space for comments and voting to be made on them. The critical difference here is that they show an excerpt only and not the full text of the article. This in my view means that ReadBurner provides a valuable and unique service in the marketplace – content aggregation and social networking features focused on RSS-based social bookmarking – while promoting publisher source content. As LifeHacker notes, it’s a sort of neat conglomeration of del.icio.us and Digg.

I contacted Drew Olanoff, co-owner of ReadBurner, and asked him if he would like to comment on what his site is doing in comparison to Shyftr. I found his response to be very interesting:

While we won’t really speak to what Shyftr is trying to do, as we’re focusing on our own strategy… I can say that ReadBurner’s goal is to not steal the conversation, but to get it started. We want to be able to send new visitors to blogs who might not have ever visited in the first place. On ReadBurner, they’ll see a steady stream of fresh stories shared from their peers and will be able to interact and re-share if they wish.

I think getting the conversation started as opposed to stealing it gets down the heart of the issue precisely.

ReadBurner also distinguishes itself in a few other ways. Its design and user interface is clean, intuitive, and blessedly straight-forward. (It’s always essential for me to have the why am I here? question answered within a few seconds of arriving at any webpage.)

And here’s another thing: ReadBurner provides two prominent links back to the original content source for each article entry: the article title itself as well a “read more” link below the excerpt. The “shares” link and comments link take you to a ReadBurner drilldown page where you can comment on the story. Again, I think this is the right approach to take. This compares very favorably to what Shyftr does, where you’re almost always forced to be at least one click away from finding a page where you can click back to the original content source.

ReadBurner was founded by Alexander Marktl and was acquired by Olanoff and Adam Ostrow last month. I’ll be keeping my eye on this one for sure.