Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Blogging is not the end-all communications solution

Peter Ejtel came by and posted a comment on my entry "The "blogger market"; plus, a question for my readers". He clarified his position with Tucows and then went on to ramble about the current "revolution" (there's always a revolution, isn't there?).

I posted a reply that you might find interesting. In it I was finally able to quantify the reasons why blogging is troubling to me as a medium.

2 comments:

Heather Meadows said...

Well, slackv, I'd record my life experiences more if I was actually doing anything interesting ^^;;; That seems to be a theme in my life lately--me sitting around talking about stuff rather than doing it.

Bleh.

But anyway, I see my blog as a reflection of me and all the things I do, and I'm hoping to include more varied things, like writing projects and Japanese study, soon.

And yes, definitely, your reasoning explains why textual media are getting first dibs on the Internet. They won't be the last word, however!

Matt! I was just thinking about you today! Haven't heard from you in awhile :) How are you? I saw that you're running for Judge/Executive of McLean County...good luck to you!

(I hate the word "meme" ;D)

Anonymous said...

True, but RSS WITH Blogging is.

I do agree that blogging in and of itself provides little value past an easy to use tool to get copy onto a web page.

Where I see the real power of blogging is in RSS, and how RSS combined with an easy to use content management tool like a blog has caused allot of activity and change in the way people are interacting with the Internet in the last year or two. Does that define a revolution? Probably not and more of word play on my part to communicate my point similar to the way you called my efforts ramblings and sleazy to communicate yours. It's all about the descriptives...

What I do agree with is the way you describe the need for a blog-like communication tool to allow you to post or comment in different multimedia formats such as photos, videos, paintings, songs, or just a recording of your voice all on a single thread, and due to the bandwidth and storage consumption not all of these are easy and cheap enough for the masses to use.

Being an active participant in the Internet industry for many years, one constant you can pretty much count on is that eventually everything becomes commoditized. Look at the efforts for the $100 laptop to see where things are heading. I just bought a top of the line computer that was about 500% more powerful than the one I bought 4 years ago, yet less than 30% of the cost with a better warrantee and support. I pay almost the same price for my 5mb broadband today that I paid for dial-up 6 years ago.

Eventually hardware and bandwidth will be effectively free or cheap enough to become disposable, where even today you will find microchips in toothbrushes and shavers that are designed to be thrown away after a couple of weeks. If you picture all of these moving parts combining you will see the fruition of your ideal in not a couple of years, but maybe even a couple of months. Our service supports 95% of what you mention although it isn't free, but at $5-9 / month it's cheaper than a cup of coffe once a day.

I can go into many specific examples of what I mean, from Itunes latest moves into podcasting, to what Yahoo and Google are doing with their acquisitions. Things are changing, and although this all may not be as revolutionary as other waves in Internet History, this will be the one that most impacts our use of the Internet every day.