CTO Blog

So for the last six months I have been trying to watch for changes in the Blogsphere, as I am wondering if maturity is setting in and changing the way we are using Blogs. Well let’s start by telling you that Greg Mankiw is now posting a Blog piece every day so his rate of ‘original’ posts has gone up, so he is still committed to Blogging, but has changed his ‘model’ from ‘discussion’ to ‘opinion’. Meantime Nicolas Carr has followed up with a further piece a few weeks back called ‘The Parasitic Blogger’ in which he says that there is an ‘echo chamber’ effect by most blogger merely taking what is in the news and reacting without adding further value, but then he adds that’s a valuable social feedback mechanism so the lack of originality doesn’t matter.

My personal research into the subject says something different about what is happening. To start with as people become more ‘practiced’, or maybe selective, in their selection of blogs to read there is less browsing going on and more use of RSS. But mostly using an RSS feed will mean that you will not be in a position to post comments unless you specifically make the effort to go back to the page in question. There is an interesting new form of RSS feed at http://fav.or.it/ but this is only in the beta stage. An alternative is to use readers with built in ‘sharing’ capabilities so you can circulate interesting stuff to your peer group, or friends, with http://friendfeed.com and www.rssmeme.com as two interesting examples. So I have little doubt that we are seeing a change in how people are ‘managing’ their reading of Blogs and this results in less use of comments, but this only applies to pretty serious ‘opinion’ or ‘news blogs, in technical blogs particularly about products the comments are still flowing, but they are much more in the form of ‘questions’ than builds on the original topic.

So in addition I think the Blogsphere is now separating into a wider variety of genres. Sure there is a popular Blogging world as Nicolas Carr says, a bit like Soaps on the TV for want of a better term, but at the other end of the scale? I reckon there are three clear types of Blogs that interest me:

1. The original opinion; as the rate of change and complexity of issues seems to continue to rise then I find myself looking more and more carefully for the Bloggers who can give me a opinion that I can use as a key part of the assembly of the facts I need to make a decision.
2. The Product interactive environment; as an example Oracle where you can interact with an expert on the product itself, and here there are large numbers of comments/questions posted.
3. The Services environment; the most challenging one to describe as it is also the newest, take a look at our own Capgemini efforts, where we are trying to show the expertise of our people as opposed to the simpler to understand format of a ‘product’ centric environment. For any services company it is becoming a medium to show the quality of expertise that your employees posses as a key part of your differentiators.

In my world certain types of Blogs has become ever more useful but at the same time I want them to be better focussed, as they compete for my attention, however my ‘interactions’ have, apparently in line with other people, dropped. Summary: We all want/need more information, more often, than Web 1.0 marketing publication of content provides, so we look for the more informed and personalised publication through Blogging, and it’s an increasingly important part of our business lives, so our expectations are higher too, but we have learnt how to use RSS and Readers to maximise our efficiency. Challenge: For businesses it’s not easy to slacken off the formal controls to allow the expertise of employees to show through as part of your business assets and differentiators, but increasingly the expectation to do this is becoming the norm.