Blogworking? Yes - but what about the potential barrier to adoption…
An interesting post on AlwaysOn (via Schel Holtz)defines Blogworking as the next evolution of social networking…
Self-governing social networks combine with interactive weblog publishing to create something people just call Blogworking. People have been Blogworking well before the term was popular, but whatever you call it, the trend is gaining momentum alongside social networking sites which do not provide editorial content.
I buy that - adding community features and participation capabilities (as differentiated from collaboration capabilities) to social networks would give me an added incentive to join and participate.
And as a marketer, these tightly focused communities, if indeed highly visited, would be extremely valuable!
There is, however, a potential barrier to adoption for these blogworking sites. The way that they are being described now, they are yet another “place” that we have to go to to stay informed. Now, most of us “belong” to multiple potential communities. I contend that if you have to start “going” (as in clicking) to multiple places in order to stay informed - you will eventually stop going to all of them!
It’s a phenomenon that we witnessed at eRoom Technology - where we built a virtual workplace/group collaboration product. Once people started to belong to multiple projects (which were happening in multiple eRooms…i.e., different urls, they quickly stopped using eRoom and reverted back to the old hacks of getting a project done with a virtual team - email, fax, phone, IM, etc. We had to integrate whatever was happening in the different virtual workplaces with people’s email (which is a person’s personal workplace) in order to overcome that adoption issue.
I suspect the same will happen here. Whatever happens in those blogworking communities will have to be fully integrated with my personal “place” - which in my case and for this kind of stuff will most likely be my personal RSS aggregator.
[Categories: blogworking collaboration community]
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April 11th, 2005 at 2:15 pm
As a blogworking pioneer, I have to disagree with your opinion on adoption. I think the biggest barrier is just really understanding how to leverage the technology in the best way, and how best to adjust the nomenclature and attitude of each site to cater to an audience.
The project you described having trouble with–I’m not sure if I understood correctly, but it seems like you had multiple communities under one main site? That’s inherently the problem right there, if that’s indeed what you did. The subcommunities take on the look, feel and personality of the main site. Whether you’re talking about pez dispensor collections, or vegetarianism, you still have the same visuals and nomenclature.
Forgive me, of course, if I misunderstood. I’m just guessing that this is what you mean. SoFlow does this, and in my opinion it’s a terrible mistake.
I’ve built two completely different blogworking sites. One for the ad industry, and one for punk rock. The graphics, nomenclature, profiles, etc are customized to the attitudes and needs of each community. And this early planning led to solidify the sense of community early, so even when there were just 50 people on the site, people had a good sense of where they were, and what they were supposed to do.
It’s my belief that blogworking is currently the best solution for community website. Those social sites that cast too wide a net only capture a superficial glimpse of their users. The insight here is that by catering to niche audiences that you have a core understanding of, you capture a loyal, trusting audience.
Personally, I’ve worked in advertising in some form since I was fourteen. I’ve also been a punk rocker, making fanzines and booking punk shows for many years. Now, I have many friends that I’ve met for both niches of my life, and these are different friends that see different aspect of my personality. Everyone is like this. I’m not going to show punk rockers my professional bio, and I’m not going to tell ad industry folk that Le Tigre is one of my favorite bands.
If someone looked at my Myspace profile, the might not know that I liked Le Tigre, or that I work in advertising. However each of these blogworking sites allows me to fully show this niche aspect of my life to the people that this niche is the most important to.
I believe that in the future, there will be several thousand blogworking sites, and each of us will belong to between three and fifteen of them. I’ll belong to Advertising, Punk Rock, Science, Indie Film, Baseball, Hockey and Vegetarianism.
April 12th, 2005 at 11:28 am
Marc - thanks so much for the comment. I appreciate your point of view - especially from the vantage point of a pioneer in community building.
The experience that I was describing is not quite what you understood. I was talking about the experiences we got at eRoom Technology. eRoom is a collaboration application - you know software to enable virtual work. We had thousands of customers and tens or hundreds of thousands of users (and they actually still do - the company is now part of EMC). The way you use eRoom is to set up a “room” (a room consists of folders, discussion threads, task lists, calendars, etc.) for a specific project. You and your project team members then access that project space through a browser (every “room” has its own url).
What we quickly discovered was that when people became a member of multiple projects, they eventually stopped using eRoom. What was happening is that adoption fell off when people had to go to too many places. That was not the only barrier to adoption - but a big one. We solved it by integrating eRoom with people’s personal workplace, which is email. You could subscribe to email alerts and email reports about what happened in your project spaces.
I otherwise agree with a lot of the points you are making. I just think that if I am a member of 15 communities it will be easier for me to stay on top of them (and for the community to keep me as an active member) if I can get updates through an rss feed which will then periodically “pull” me back into the virtual community.
April 13th, 2005 at 2:55 am
Hmmmmmm. Some interesting points and observations here. As a newbie to the blogworking world, in more ways than one, presently as a developer, and a user, I see interesting points in both your observations.
Here are a couple of my thoughts:
It is clear to me that the social site myspace.com is turning into the “MTV” of social networking while Friendster.com is the “VH-1″. As Mark says in blogworking there will eventually be thousands of channels to pick from. They will be very personal and specialized. Mine will be humanitarian service, technology, travel, food/wine/restaurants, and perhaps sailing. I could be wrong about this, but I think 5 to 6 sites is about the normal number people will migrate to and settle on over time. I do think that is very important that every aspect of these sites be custom tailored to the specific target audience.
I think the anchor is the “water cooler effect” that people will be using the sites for very focused personal entertainment, gossip and fulfillment, more so than as a gathering point of general information. The times they do go to the site seeking information, they will find exactly what they are looking for in a hurry from either searching other members or blogs. And also, I think that like most other things in life, the 80/20 rule will apply, 20% of the community will be doing 80% of the activity. Those active 20% will just leave their communities on their browsers 24/7 whether it be on the their Treo’s or their desktops. The whole blogworking experience will be much more valuable and enjoyable once affordable, ubiquitous, high-speed wireless Internet is available globally. Those that aren’t quite so active will use the email feeds for their vehicle to remain active and interested.
I am not an expert on rss feeds, but maybe that would be a good tool for generating new activity and keeping members as well.
June 4th, 2005 at 9:36 pm
Old wine, new bottle. No, same bottle, new label. It is difficult for me to see how blogworking is any different from bulletin boards such as webhostingtalk or crea8 that have woven huge communities around a specific topic. Registered with adholes.com and lo, it’s a somewhat different interface from what forums on the net have traditionally been. So what was the new feature again?
June 4th, 2005 at 9:49 pm
Or Google groups / Yahoo groups for that matter.