Scoble Thinks Blogging Has Failed Us

by Stowe Boyd, 156 South Park, San Francisco

Although it is a bit gloomy (maybe the overcast of the past week in the Bay Area has dampened Robert's sunny nature), I have to agree with some -- definitely not all -- of the complaints that Scoble has leveled at blogs. In particular:

[from Has/How/Why tech blogging has failed you]

More ways we’ve failed you?

Our commenting systems really suck. I didn’t realize just how badly they sucked until I started using FriendFeed. My comments here are gummed up with moderation, with spam filters that only sorta work, that don’t have threading, and have many other problems ranging from needing to be signed into, to not working on mobile devices very well, to requiring you to enter weird numbers or do math just to be able to post a comment.

What does this mean? Only the most motivated will leave comments.

/Message has always been about the deep structure of social tools: not at a software or hardware architectural level, but at the human cognition and the societal level. /Message will remain focused on that.

Robert is all gaga over Friendfeed, which I think has a lot of interesting features, but his initial statement is correct, although wrongly directed. It is not us, we the bloggers, who have piss poor commenting systems: it's the blogging platforms. [I will be giving a talk in Berlin in a few months, at the Web 2.0 Expo, called "Better Media Plumbing For The Social Web", a deep dive into the architecture of discourse on the web, and it's most egregious problems.]

The weaknesses of blog comments systems are exacerbated by the migration of commentary from blogs to the faster paced flow apps, like Twitter, Friendfeed, Feedly, Facebook, etc. (a topic I have discussed extensively, here, here, and here). The result is a fragmented and jumbled world where we basically never can see the whole body of conversation going on about some post.

Note that trackbacks seem to be dying (just like voicemail?) because a solution that is partial and unreliable is worse than nothing.

But Robert enumerates other reasons why blogging has failed that are, really, personal misgivings about his own situation as a blogger or the outcome of blogging's maturation. As blogging has destabilized conventional media, those media have begun to adopt the trappings -- and to some extent the real DNA -- of writing from the edge. So we can put to one side the concern that blogging has become too mainstream. Likewise, if Scoble wants to get back to being helpful and focused on what he really personally likes, great.

Robert has done me a service by teeing up this reflective reexamination of his personal motivations for blogging. In my case, I can't imagine a life without writing. I write 'man of letters' as my occupation on government forms these days.

/Message is going through changes as I rejigger the orientation of my work life. I am getting more involved in the media side of things, after a long hiatus. I was president of Corante, a blogging pioneer, and left the company in late 2005, but now I intend to push ahead with The /Messengers in that direction.

/Message has always been about the deep structure of social tools: not at a software or hardware architectural level, but at the human cognition and the societal level. /Message will remain focused on that.

As a result, I have managed to mostly dodge the PR folks that Robert gripes about, since /Message is not a 'breaking news' blog, but a hair more contemplative, more interested in the emerging web culture than what start-up has raised a million bucks. I am only half kidding when I use the category 'Webthropology' here.

So, while I don't join Robert's implicit mea culpa, I am happy to rededicate myself to being helpful and writing about things that I think genuinely matter, not just Apple's newest gizmo or the peccadillos of tech personalities.