Blogging is about communicating and community

Published by neil on January 2nd, 2008

I keep waffling on about how I do not make New Years resolutions, but I have discovered that this year I seem to be making them all over the place. Perhaps the calendar is simply drawing more attention to my ongoing aims to address life’s negatives and embrace life’s positives, something I have been doing quite a bit through 2007.

So here’s another non-resolution…

The strength of a blog is in its comments; it’s conversation. I have already taken the important step here to kill the nofollow, but I want to encourage more commenting and more conversations. This will mean you are likely to see a higher frequency of conversation encouraging posts, and, most importantly, I will be walking the walk and commenting elsewhere a lot more. So if you have a blog I follow, stick the kettle on as I’ll be popping around soon for a cuppa.

What has triggered this for me is the increasing understanding of how the social network - that supposed great enabler of communications - build more barriers to real, valuable communication than it really enables. This has been the main reason I have not embraced sites such as facebook - the security/privacy issues are a major point too - as I have found that they inhibit quality communication and increase background noise. Social networks, and I am primarily talking about non-niche networks here, also provide very little payoff for the amount of effort needed to maintain a presence. So much time is spent on valueless tasks just keeping up with weak personal connections until the primary task becomes management and not creation. Once the process overtakes the value, the time becomes worthless. Blogs break this cycle in that it is the content which motivates and fuels the communication connections. Without content, no-one turns up and no-one sticks around - they have no reason to do so. But perhaps that is the attraction of social networks to so many people as they enable (trivial) connections with very little effort on the part of the initiator - just a click of a button. On that basis, it is not unreasonable to assume that lack of input will generate lack of payoff.

I have wandered a little here but I thin there might be a more substantial blog post about how I feel non-niche social networks are detrimental to our lives and to the devaluing of the internet as a whole.

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