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Centered Communication: Weblogs and Aggregation in the OrganizationCentered Communication: Webl0gs and
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 Ton Zijlstra is on to something. He describes blogs as "personal presence portals", and then goes on to describe the "awkwardness" that we feel when we go from 'knowing' someone through their blog to meeting them in person. His solution to that is simple: acknowledge the awkwardness explicitly in the first face-to-face conversation, and then work through it. Jon Husband chimes in with the observation that on-line 'presence' is still foreign to us, and we need to learn how to use it, much as at one point in our lives we first learn to use the telephone. So why is it that learning to use the telephone is childsplay, while learning to use blogs, especially when 'enriched' with Skype VoIP telephony, IM, wikis and webcams is so awkward, so hard? It all comes down to the subject of Ton's post: presence. Ton refers to this article that defines presence as a high-quality simulation of actual personal existence, high-quality implying socially rich, perceptually and socially realistic, transporting (in both senses of the word), immersing, and natural. Do blogs, with or without add-on multimedia tools, provide a high-quality simulation of the author's existence, do they have presence? To understand why this question is meaningless, we need to turn to the guru of media, Marshall McLuhan. In his landmark book Understanding Media, almost half a century ago, he explained the difference between media and tools. Communications media are place holders for content, for the message ("the medium is the message"). Communication tools are technologies that deliver the content, the message . In today's electronic age, he said, the two have become blurred together. So my communication media decision tree from last year, reproduced above, while useful, is somewhat flawed, in that it mixes the two together. But if we want to understand blogs, which are part media, part tools, we need to unblur these distinct characteristics. The best way to do this is to understand what, in McLuhan's terminology, the constituent parts of blogs are extensions of. The telephone, a communication tool, is an extension of the ear and the voice. Radio is a communication tool, likewise an extension of the ear and voice, but the radio program is a communications medium, an extension of the programmer's memory (and, if we tape it, an extension of our memory as well). Blogs, like newspaper columns or news digests, are essentially communications media, extensions of our memories, place holders for our ideas and messages. They are not really extensions of our brains, because they capture, like a snapshot, our thinking at one point in time. Although we can try to make them conversational and describe our thought processes in a blog article, they do not, in their simplest form, allow the reader to truly engage our brains in real or close-to-real time. Now, blogs also have two communication tools included: a publishing and subscription tool (RSS), which does transmit our messages (very well), and the rudimentary comments 'thread' functionality which, like a poor web forum, does allow some dialogue with the author and with other readers. The thread is a (lousy, and because it's asynchronous, jerky) extension of our brains. To some extent the Internet itself is a communication tool that disseminates our blog comment; it is the blog's 'printing press'. And by that analogy, RSS is like the delivery truck that takes the newspaper to the subscriber's house -- both are communication tools, though RSS is clearly the superior delivery vehicle. So what? Well, there is a huge amount of discussion about how to make blogs better, how to use them in business, and what their future is, none of which makes the essential distinction between their role and value as communication media and their role and value as communication tools. I would argue that the critical functionality of blogs, both in personal and business use, is as a personal communications medium i.e. a storage space for everything of consequence in our memories, and everything of consequence in that other extension of our memory, the filing cabinet (and its electronic analogue, the 'My Documents' folder). As I've said in my posts on the future of blogs and in my future state visions, I think blogs will eventually (and properly) morph into purer, simpler versions of this one critical functionality -- they will become the proxies, the substitutes for our memories, for use by friends and business contacts when we're busy or away from the high-presence communication tools, by vendors to ascertain our need for their offerings, and by ourselves as a place to organize, store and access our own thoughts and memories, thus freeing up more of our real memories for new ideas and perceptions. There have been some interesting articles lately by people who say that making and keeping huge numbers of dynamic lists and notes, instead of trying to keep all that in our memories, we can actually enrich our brain's power, our intellectual effectiveness and even our intelligence by 'freeing up memory and brain CPU'. Next-generation blogs could be perfect for that, not only freeing up our memories but also allowing others access to our ideas and learnings. So to that limited extent, blogs have presence -- they can be excellent simulations, surrogates, proxies for our personal memories. But what if we need more context to be able to properly understand the message, or effectively use or build on the content of this virtual memory? Then we need high-quality, high-presence communication tools, not communication media. We are rapidly moving towards a convergence of several 'online' communication tools: telephony, e-mail, IM, and potentially voice-mail and videoconferencing. Right now, the content, the stored messages of these various tools are unintegrated, but voice recognition and transcription is quickly improving and we will soon be able to 'record' conversations in any of these media in one simple, intuitive way, and with Simple Virtual Presence we will also have a simple intuitive way to connect with people using any or all of these media. Then we'll need a 'bridge' to allow each of the participants in a conference to see anything in the blog/virtual memory of any of the participants. Until that day arrives, blogs get high marks as a communication medium, but barely a passing grade as communication tools. If the technology developers understand the distinction, and start building tools that are properly engineered for simple, seamless connectivity, then one day the blurring won't matter, and the integration between media and tools will be complete. |
BlogHer Conference '05 will provide an open, inclusive forum to:Link (Thanks, Suzy!)1. Discuss the role of women within the larger blog community
2. Examine the developing (and debatable) code of blogging ethics
3. Discover how blogging is shrinking the world and amplifying the voices of women worldwide
sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/a/2004/06/04/inter
national1058EDT0538.DTL&type=printable
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Five years ago today, Dave Winer wrote about syndication and aggregation. Dave, thanks for all you efforts to promote weblogs and syndication - you've helped open a lot of possibilities for a lot of people.
Let me say this upfront. What Jason is spelling out has several problems - which he also perfectly elucidates.
What he doesn't say is "that for all this to happen" - you need a COORDINATING company to make sure it all works. That's obvious.
I'll put my own answers to Jason's issues - IN BOLD AND CAPS - but I think you'll all see that Jason PERFECTLY spells out a realistic DLA scenario - thats' totally open and doable - by year's end.
Here we go.
Here's Jason's post called "Some "Web as platform" noodling"
In the discussion of Flickr and Feedburner's spliced RSS/Atom files, Harold said:
I'm beginning to think that feeds (and content tagging) should be the starting point, not an offshoot. Until now, our tools have produced web pages then feeds. I'm thinking we need tools that create feeds and then let us combine them into web pages.
To put this another way, a distributed data storage system would take the place of a local storage system. And not just data storage, but data processing/filtering/formatting. Taking the weblog example to the extreme, you could use TypePad to write a weblog entry; Flickr to store your photos; store some mp3s (for an mp3 blog) on your ISP-hosted shell account; your events calendar on Upcoming; use iCal to update your personal calendar (which is then stored on your .Mac account); use GMail for email; use TypeKey or Flickr's authentication system to handle identity; outsource your storage/backups to Google or Akamai; you let Feedburner "listen" for new content from all those sources, transform/aggregate/filter it all, and publish it to your Web space; and you manage all this on the Web at each individual Web site or with a Watson-ish desktop client.
Think of it like Unix...small pieces loosely joined. Each specific service handles what it's good at. Gmail for mail, iCal for calendars, TypePad for short bits of text, etc. Web client, desktop client, it doesn't much matter...whatever the user is most comfortable with. Then you just (just! ha!) pipe all these together however you want with services (or desktop apps) handling any filtering/processing that you need, and output it to the file/device/service of your choice. New services can be inserted into the process as they become available. You don't need to wait for Gmail to output RSS...just pipe your email to Feedburner and they'll hook you up.
There are, of course, plenty of hurdles to overcome:
- Currently a bit hard on wallet. When you're paying $5-20 per month for each one of these services (in addition to $50/mo for broadband and $45/mo for your cell phone), living the connected lifestyle is expensive. If a company like Google can offer bundles of these services, it might get cheaper.
WHY JUST GOOGLE? FIRST OF ALL - WHAT YOU'RE DESCRIBING WAS CALLED HAILSTORM - AND MICROSOFT MIGHT JUST GET TO IT - TOO - ONCE LONGHORN SHIPS AND WE DO ALL THEIR R&D FOR THEM.
SECOND OF ALL - I THINK BEFORE GOOGLE GETS THERE - MY COMPANY BROADBAND MECHANICS WILL - IN ADDITION TO OTHERS. YOU ALSO DIDN'T MENTION DRUPAL OR SOME SORT OF FRAMEWORK (MAYBE EVEN IBM'S NEW 'ECLIPSE' AS MIDDLEWARE) THAT PULLS ALL OF THIS TOGETHER AND PROVIDES COMMUNITY FEATURES.... COMMUNITY SITES ARE EXACTLY WHERE A BUNCH OF GEEKS - WORK TOGETHER - AND GET THIS ALL TO WORK - FOR PARTICULAR AFFINITY GROUPS, TARGETED VERTICALS AND LOCAL REGIONAL ACTIVISM.
- Data needs to be portable. If Flickr starts to suck, you should be able to easily move all of your photos to a better service.
DUDE - FLICKR AIN'T GONNA EVER SUCK. IT ROCKS.
- Redundancy and failing gracefully. What if Blogger is unavailable when I want to rebuild my Web site after my Flickr photostream has been updated (see my MTAmazon plug-in problem)? Does the rebuild just fail or is the data cached somewhere?
AMEN BROTHER - STABILITY IS WHAT IT'S ALL ABOUT. THAT DOESN'T HAPPEN BY DEFAULT IT TAKES HARD WORK - WORK THAT SOMEBODY HAS TO PAY FOR.
- You need to get everyone to agree on interop/formats/etc. Fortunately, it seems like companies are a lot more willing to do this than 4-5 years ago (Amazon, Google, Flickr, Upcoming, & TypePad all have APIs or allow data output via RSS/Atom).
NOW LET'S SEE? WHAT THE HELL HAVE I BEEN DOING LA TELY?
- Security. Lots of passwords and personal information will have to be passed around for all this to work. How about some commitment from these companies to keep this data as secure as they can?
HAVE YOU HEARD OF SXIP - YET? THE PIECES OF THE PUZZLE ARE COMING TOGETHER - RIGHT IN FRONT OF OUR EYES!
This, then, is the promise of Web services. Nothing new, but it's nice to see things continue to head in this direction.
RIGHT ON TO JASON FOR WRITING THIS. MAJOR BOOKMARK TIME! I LOVE IT WHEN SMART PEOPLE DO THE WORK FOR ME.
Related reading:
- GooOS,
the Google Operating System (kottke.org)
-
Inventing the Future (Tim O'Reilly)
- T
he Web as a Platform (John Battelle)
- Deepleap was an early attempt at some of this stuff (Lane
Becker)
mARC'S FINAL THANK YOU TO jASON.....
I love the way you put it and visionize DLAs. Now we just gotta do a version of that for huamns - and for mom's - who need to find playmates and baby sitters for the kids.
Oh yah - you didn't mention OpenListings - an economic engine for the blogosphere.
:-)
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