Stowe Boyd has a fascinating post about how he sees the changing blog landscape. It’s a fairly technical piece but essentially he is suggesting that with the advent of ‘flow’ style applications like Twitter, the ‘conversations’ we’ve been having in blogs (which are effectively locked in silos) is now under the control of those who are commenting. What that means is that conversations move away into other (sort of) silos and so the ability of the blog owner to fully monetize becomes a lot more difficult. I kinda but kinda not buy that part of his argument.
For example, I have a FriendFeed addition to this site that shows what people are saying about blog posts here. It’s below the comments section. What’s interesting is that the conversations are not lost per se but they now ‘reside’ somewhere that’s more convenient for readers who might otherwise come here.
In addition, I have a plug in that auto-posts the title of all my blog posts to Twitter. For many people I know, that’s a primary alert mechanism though some think it’s just another way of pimping a post. Maybe, maybe not. But it is more or less in line with what Stowe is saying about how conversations are being pulled out of the blogs. But this is where it gets interesting. Stowe says:
The inexorable transition away from the Web of Pages — which blogging as we know it is part of — to the Web of Flow means that a new model of blogging will evolve to match the new principles of flow-first relationships on the web. Today’s transitional hybrid model creates serious dissonance: blog posts exist statically at a particular URL, while comments are increasingly experienced as a stream within dedicated flow tools.
If we are to have a new generation of blogging it will be something more radical than Riley’s middle ground.
How about a blogging platform that is based on flow, directly?
Stowe was really thinking about this from the media perspective. While I largely concur with his thinking, I have a different view.
In answer to Stowe’s last sentence, that’s already happening in a fashion as part of the ESME Project. What we’re really trying to do is insert the ideas around Stowe’s concept of ‘conversational flow’ into its natural business process setting. It should mean a collapsing of the time sink that people get into as they’re attempting to solve business problems. I can’t say more than that right now for various legal reasons way too complicated to explain.
The exciting thing is that if ‘we’ get it right, (and all the current indications are that we will) then it could usher in a new way of thinking about problem solving that doesn’t tether people to email and/or a specific flavour of instant messaging, blog posts, forums and the like. That’s radical by any standards but even so, I’ve been genuinely surprised at the level of interest in this approach.
When the penny dropped for me about tools such as Twitter it was always in the back of my mind that the best use cases would come from enterprise. The fact that the Twitter people made available a programming interface against which others can develop has opened a treasure chest of development genius.
We’re capitalizing upon that. Not because we’re a bunch of money grubbing software people but because the opportunity and potential to effect real business change without creating a process change nightmare is too big to ignore. For many of my usual readers, this may sound like gobbledy-gook or pie in the sky thinking but it isn’t. Like all good ideas, at its heart, it is very simple. Let people use what’s best for them on the conversation or communications side but allow that to infuse itself into the flow of the applications they need to use.
So to answer my own question – yes the conversation has moved but it doesn’t matter. At least not from my perspective.
Finally – the ‘related articles’ links below provide a wealth of information in and around this topic. All worth reading in my opinon.
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