On “MicroBlogging”
Bradley Horowitz has a post about Yahoo! Answers that helps me put a finger on some things that I’ve been churning on since I started this blog. As he puts it:
Blogging has been heralded as the poster child for “user-generated content” or “amateur publishing” or whatever buzzword you may prefer. And at a technical and procedural level this is certainly true. The process of becoming “a blogger” has never been easier.
The hard part (now that the barriers to entry have melted away) is having something worthwhile to say. That really hasn’t gotten any easier. Moreover as a newly minted “blogger” there’s an expectation that you’ll have a consistent, steady stream of interesting postings for your readers to enjoy. Nothing sadder than a dead blog or inactive blog.
But what of the more casual “blogger?” Someone who has only the occasional gem of wisdom to share? Someone who may not want to carry the baggage associated with owning and maintaining a blog per se?
Interesting, because I started this blog in order to have a place for the occasional point, rather than as an attempt to keep up with the many folks who are out there trying to be the first to jump on every new meme in order to be authoritative, comprehensive, recognized, or whatever. I just want to participate in the conversation. But I do feel a responsibility to not get stale in a way that’s quite different from the way I’ve felt about Auctions for Change over the two years. And I don’t always have something interesting to contribute and/or time to contribute it.
Bradley’s point (or one of them) is Yahoo! Answers is one way users can participate in generating blog-like content, conveniently and whenever they feel like it. Certainly the ability to contribute is not new, but the ability to derive consensus from these contributions is — and thus the level of authority conveyed by crowdsourced approaches has them emerging alongside prominent bloggers in leading and impacting public opinion.
As an example, think about the number of times you’ve had bad customer experiences at restaurants and then fantasized you had a review column in the NY Times in which you could tell the world about it. Not everyone can personally do what Jeff Jarvis did about his “Dell Hell” experience, but anyone can put their two cents in a place where others - if their opinion strikes a chord - are likely to pick up on it and amplify. In this post, an engadget commenter notes the prominence in amazon reviews of a key design flaw in a pair of headphones. Good luck to Logitech in having savvy buyers not pick up on that.
While some of these systems can still be gamed (e.g., Amazon reviews) on a one-off basis, as they are open to each other and overlap with systems like blogging that depend on reputational relationships and relative authority, they become more valuable to all of us who want to see what others have to say and maybe get a word in edgewise ourselves.
