The drive towards blogging is facilitated, IMO, by the perceived ease of use of blogging software. This isn't a new trend, of course, but it is becoming more obviously observable through the blogging world. Because the basic denominator of a blog is posts done in reverse chronological order, blogging lends itself to news and one-way communications such as editorial columns, corporate news, press releases, and the like. The speed with which one can quickly get a message out using blogging software is unparalleled at the moment. Say what you might about Wikis but they aren't as easy to use as most blogging software and solutions from Blogger and Typepad feel a lot like using Microsoft Word. As for the concept of pushing your message to users through RSS rather than pulling them to your site to get your messages within a certain context, it would seem that once again, the pendulum has swung back to the push. Again, not a new phenomenon. I've seen it fluctuate back and forth over my years of working in corporate communications. Do we email them the information or just post it to the intranet? The tradeoffs in each are what usually start the pendulum swinging again. What I'd like to see a study explore is the ego/vanity aspects of blogging. I blog, but I do it more to sort out my own thoughts and catalogue sites and interesting net phenomenon. I don t' care as much about whether I get readers or not. However, I suspect many do care and I have to wonder if the wholesale adoption of RSS feeds pushed out to people are an attempt to feel your blogging time is justified by ensuring that your message is getting out there. Those are a few of my random thoughts on this phenomenon. Tamara Paradis jeremy hunsinger wrote:
one of my daily reads Jim Romensko's obscure store just moved from being an independently designed newsite to a typepad blog. this struck me immediately as a devaluation of the site because it had become 'just another blog', whereas before It was a uniquely designed news-site that people had to visit to read. In that they had to visit it to read it, it was experienced as a whole, and its parts were always in relation to one another as organized on the page, which gave some added value. designwise i think the argument is obvious and has been made many times about the 'value-added' of good design and layout, however, the thing with blogs is that we can read them via rss and we never need to see the original design at all, or perhaps we need to see it once in a while, but certainly not every day. Also, when blogs are read via rss, they parts need not be read in direction relation to each other as a whole, but can be read mixed with unlimited other blog-feeds, in the romenesko case, i think this lowers the overall sense of irony and humor involved.
I'm wondering if other people are exploring this aspect of perceived value in blogging as compared to other online media, and if so, are there any studies available, and if not, would someone be interested in working on developing a project in this direction.
_______________________________________________ The Air-l-aoir.org@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/