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May 10, 2003
Deep thinking: 60 hour feedback
So I've been keeping an eye on the Comments and Cosmos for my "Deep Thinking" essay. There has been some nice praise, some good commentary and some constructive criticism.
But let's start with the flamage. The closest thing I've seen to a flame comes from Matthew Thomas, who wrote "I was disappointed to see Andrew Grumet's essay on Weblogs didn't say anything at all, it seemed intended merely as Weblog linkbait...". Ouch! Actually he's mostly right. As for the "didn't say anything" part, I think that Matthew is raising the point, also noted by several others, that I haven't said much that is new. That's definitely true. Most of what I wrote has appeared at least once in the blogosphere. So I would expect an experienced weblogger to have this reaction. The problem I saw was that these things were hard to find and, for a new weblogger, hard to understand. My intended audience is the outsiders, people that might have heard about weblogs but can't make heads or tails of the mostly inward-focussed chatter of the weblogging world. Linkbait? Well, yeah, sure I want flow to my essay. If I didn't want flow, I could have left it on my harddrive. But if all I wanted was flow, I would have spent less time and tried to offend more people :-).
My friend Perry asked in the Comments section about blogging and business. I pointed her to Dan Bricklin's Small Business Blogging as one good hopping-off point. The other thing I noted was that press releases seem like a good way to begin. Publishing the press releases in RSS would help promotional information about a company to flow through the Net. Publishing in RSS would also make it easy for sector reports and VC portfolio company listings to display the latest releases from groups of companies. No specialized technology required: companies would use any of several blogging tools to author the press releases; VCs and sector reports could use any of several news aggregators.
My friend Doug writes that he is "still a little skeptical about the predictions of massive impact of syndicated blog content. Speaking purely about my own habits, I don't have the interest or time to scan even RSS summaries of many blogs." This is a useful observation. We can only read so much in a day, and most weblogs aren't particularly well-written or interesting. The question is, which sources will you depend on? I hereby make the claim that weblogs will give you more choices by levelling the playing field. In your news aggregator, crank weblog writers look the same as employees of multinational media conglomerates. It's up to you to decide who is worth reading, but everybody has an equal shot at your subscription list.
Finally, by way of this post at L'oeil de Mouche, I found my way over to Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog. Windley talks about weblogs as "loosely coupled conversations", which is exactly what I was trying to get at in the Weblogs and online communities section of the essay, but Phil does a much better job.
Posted by Andrew Grumet at May 10, 2003 09:17 PM
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“My intended audience is the outsiders, people that might have heard about weblogs but can’t make heads or tails of the mostly inward-focussed chatter of the weblogging world.”
Fair enough, but in that case, your essay is functionally identical to Dave Winer’s “What are Weblogs?” (http://www.userland.com/whatAreWeblogs), which says almost the same stuff in 9 percent of the length.
You’ve actually been quite clever here — by making your piece essay-length, and therefore apparently more intellectual, you’ve tricked more Webloggers into linking to it (http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/links.html?url=http%3A%2F%2Fgrumet.net%2Fwriting%2Fweb%2Fdeep-thinking-about-weblogs.html) than link to Dave’s piece (http://www.google.com/search?q=link:STzYuetNXFIC:www.userland.com/whatAreWeblogs). My complaint, however, is that the extra linkage probably won’t compensate for the smaller proportion of visitors who will actually *read* it because it because of its length.
Posted by: mpt at May 11, 2003 12:26 AMGah, I didn’t mean “complaint”, I meant “concern”. I’ve got absolutely no right to complain about what you’re writing. :-)
I’ll stop talking now, lest I make even more of a fool of myself.
Posted by: mpt at May 11, 2003 12:35 AMNow that you mention it, the quote that opens paragraph two of the "pet rock" section was taken for Winer's "What Are Weblogs?". Originally I was hyperlinking to it but the hyperlink got lost in editing. That's fixed now.
Posted by: Andrew Grumet at May 11, 2003 05:48 PM