blogging

The back is the front

I don't know which came first. I'm pretty sure RSS was developed for broadcast news sites before bloggers adopted it, but you could argue that the first blog was Tim Berners Lee's list of new pages added to the WWW. It doesn't really matter because the order of adoption by individuals needn't relate to the order of original development.

Thinking some more, I'd like to re-emphasise what I said about 'experiencing them over a period of time' because I think that can be a powerful bonding force which seems to work in a similar way with blogs and CoPs. Reading an archived discussion, FAQ or website might give you all the information but it doesn't affect the reader personally in the same way as that drip feed of daily updates and interaction which maybe hooks people into blogs and communities like continuing serials do for TV. Eek, now I've done it - I've compared CoPs to soap opera. I'll get my coat.

RSS reading is the way in

If you want to encourage new bloggers to get started then it's probably most important to get them reading others blogs via RSS first (or at the same time). If they can get the idea of subscribing to lots of blogs, and experiencing them over a period of time, then the desire to join in by having their own will naturally follow on from that.

Depends...

It kind of depends how secure you need it to be.

Typepad offers password protection on the basic package for $4.95 a month.

You can start a blogger blog, chose the option not to have it published in their index and then not tell anybody about it. That would give you a reasonably private space for personal reflection.

Then there are blog/wiki combination services with logins such as pbwiki.

Yes please

I'm up for any blogging research activity too, whetever is decided.

As a guest, I'm not yet clear what kind of linkages already exist for cpsquared members' blogs. There's an attempt to use technorati tags but that will probably stay loose. One thing I'm fairly clear on is that multi-author / group blogs are not the way to go. Aggregating individual blogs with something like superglu probably is, but RSS is not always reliable across different flavours so building joint blogrolls and allowing self registration on a wiki page might be thrown in as well.

Since this would be organised from an existing community, it's possible to agree some social niceties to include, help and motivate those who are just starting out. I didn't catch the discussion about blog buddies but designated mentoring might ensure that no blogs go unnoticed.

Data collection is not an obvious activity with blogging though. Any thoughts on that?

Trackback and pings

Trackback is a system which is supposed to facilitate more cross linking between blogs, but last year it looked to me as if it was more trouble than it's worth with all the spam pings. So I stopped showing trackbacks on my Movable Type blog, but now I'm beginning to notice that when I post to my new Wordpress blog, the pings do show up on some blogs. But I can't display trackbacks on my own for some reason. To me this is indicative of the state of the technology with blogging and RSS. It only just about works, and sometimes things which worked ok yesterday don't work anymore today. The same thing happens with aggregators which just give up displaying certain feeds for no particular reason. When for the vast majority of bloggers the mode number of comments per post is zero, it's no wonder that so many conclude that they are talking only to themselves and lapse into non-blogging or read-only mode.

Yes it's time consuming

I've got into the habit of using a deli.cio.us tag to track my own comments which makes it easier but it's still time consuming. So is reading hundreds of blogs, which bloggers tend to do. And reading RSS feeds in a web-based reader is quite inefficient too, waiting for pages to download and inevitably getting the same read posts coming up again.

I agree with what Nancy said elsewhere

"I think the HYPE of 2.0 is people trying to convince others that this interaction is new. It is not new."

It isn't even necessarily more effective than some of what went on before, and can bring in new inequalities, not just technological ones but in terms of placing the emphasis and control much more in the hands of individuals acting as individuals rather than socially. That's a huge contradiction when the potential for subverting existing organisational structures is being touted as a great leveller.

How are we going to hold the more fragile communities together when some of the key contributors may be increasingly tempted to publish their ideas mainly on their own blogs to the detriment of the overall level of interaction?