Michael's Place

I recently wrote that there are two distinct types of bloggers: professional bloggers and personal bloggers.  By professional I don’t necessarily mean paid-to-write, as most are not (unless you count what is probably a few pennies per month via Adsense). Rather, just that there is some professional motivation behind their writing. I also suggested that a good way to look at the difference between these two groups is that professional blogging is more like publishing, while personal blogging is more about communicating.

Pretend for a moment that you are going to publish a magazine. One of the first steps would be to decide what your magazine is about. This decision is key because it determines not just what kind of articles may be included in the magazine, but it also defines the audience. Speaking of which, you’d then need to worry about building up that audience. These same publishing concerns apply to professional bloggers who must also limit their posts to the theme of their blog, or risk losing the readership they are trying to build.

But are the millions of people that are posting their random thoughts on their personal blogs worried about keeping their blog entries on topic? Of course not, otherwise they wouldn't be random. Similarly, are the personal bloggers that are posting these random things worried about how many people are reading their blog? Not really. But they are concerned, more specifically, with who is reading their blog. They want people they know to read what they’re writing. Therefore, if personal bloggers aren’t constrained by a topic nor care about building an audience, is it accurate to call their blogging endeavors publishing?

In my opinion, this type of blogging is more similar to communicating via e-mail than it is to publishing. In the mid to late 1990s most electronic communication was done via e-mail. When you needed to send a message to somebody, or a few people, or everyone you knew (or whose e-mail you had) you fired off an e-mail. When instant messaging came about,  informal one-to-one messages that required instant feedback moved from e-mail to IM (or from the telephone to IM). Similarly, a personal blog can be a better way to deliver a non-critical, no-response-required message to a large group of people than e-mail. It’s about communication.

I believe the two different types of blogging will have two different futures. I'm excluding the corporate-sponsored professional blogs, which will always have a place as a company's “Industry News” or “Company News” page.  I think professional blogging will eventually subside and fade away as have other publishing fads. When was the last time you heard the word “e-zine”, for example?

 As renowned Letters from the Front author John Pezaris puts it, the ease of publishing leads to "more and more drivel published, and the fraction that’s actually any good becomes vanishingly small”.   It’s not that every professional blog is drivel but it is getting to the point where, even if you’re a hip tagging/RSS/trackback jockey, you still can’t find the good stuff. I’ve almost given up and find myself increasingly turning to - make that going back to - traditional sources like CNET, Wired, PC Magazine, and AP Tech, where I know the journalists have earned some credibility and there are at least some editorial standards.

The fact that there is so much professional blogging going on, with much of it drivel, is increasingly leading to backlash. Ironically, much of this backlash against blogging takes place on blogs. One example is this entry itself. For another example, Maddox calls bloggers narcissistic on his own blog. Ultimately, I believe aspiring writers or journalists looking to get noticed will be better off taking a step backward in the web-publishing evolution by putting their musings on a web-page that doesn’t look like, nor is called, a blog. The same words by what appears to be a real journalist writing for some e-zine will be interpreted more positively than if by yet another blogger on yet another blog.

When I was 10 or 11 years old my parents encouraged me to write in a diary, or in masculine terminology, a journal. At the time I was perhaps too immature to appreciate the therapeutic or retrospective benefits of keeping a personal private journal. But I do recall questioning, at a mere 10 or 11 years old, why should I waste time writing stuff that nobody else is reading? Personal bloggers often come to the same conclusion which is why personal blogging will evolve from its perception of being a personal publishing technology to that of being a social communications technology.

Blogging solutions that simply allow people to publish in a vacuum will continue to be abandoned by its users that actually want not just an audience, but an interactive one. And if I may say so, that’s why I love Multiply’s ‘brilliant-mentation’ of blogging. (Hey, if Judith Meskill can coin “simple-mentation”, I can coin “brilliant-mentation”.) By integrating blogging with social-network based communication tools, Multiply not only provides people an audience, but also the means to communicate with that audience.

There are a few other sites trying to integrate blogs with social networking, but they are severely inefficient as communications tools which makes them equally inefficient for personal blogging. Since Multiply is the only site that alerts everyone in the blogger’s social network not just when a new entry is posted, but when anyone replies to a discussion about the entry, I’m comfortable stating that the future of personal blogging is here.