Blogging needs to be social. There are many reasons for this, but the most important one — in my mind — is the changing nature of content.
…Thus writes Om Malik of gigaom. The issue here is that most Web content is disjoined -like he says, atomized. So how do we bring this content together?
Some users think they found an answer in Facebook or Friendfeed -well, now the two are joined, aren’t they, and Facebook’s buyout of Friendfeed just makes things worse. Actually writes Om,
Millions of Facebook users will have no reason to use any other service for the foreseeable future. And even when they decide to leave, they’ll realize they can’t, for they’ll have stored their photos and videos into the service, which has no visible way of exporting such data. It’s the ultimate lock-in: control consumers’ data and you control everything.
This is a freaky thought, about Facebook being the actual perpetual owner of many people’s photos and video. Plus, I add Facebook provides no way to extract RSS feeds out of it, thus it is impossible to incorporate some of its (people-generated) content into other sites!
But this is not the main issue here. The Facebook example serves only to show how incomplete (and misleading) this solution to the aforementioned problem is.
Instead, gigaom sees a more dynamic role for blogs, which they may fulfill provided they evolve
from the hierarchical content-management systems of today to more fluid, free-flowing, more socially relevant and real-time lifestreaming systems.
Thus, the next gen of blogging systems must take into account the fact the information flows (the concept of lifestream is part of this…) via email, Twitter, IM and other formats/media. Posterous and Tumblr have already begun exploring that venue, and gigaom produced the GigaOM Daily Plugin for WordPress.
Om also adds the bonus of a few articles or posts on blogging, twittering and so on, which are great reads. Hre they are:
- Anil Dash’s post about the Pushbutton web.
- John Gruber’s piece about the censoring of the iPhone app, Ninja Words, by Apple.
- Danah Boyd’s post about Twitter and teens.
- John Borthwick’s essay about the real-time web and new distribution networks.
- Robert Scoble’s post about the shortcomings of the Twitter platform.
So, what’s next? Meanwhile, do not drop photos onto Facebook!