Weblog Commercialization

Various trends in the Blogosphere make some people nervous (in 2003). What's involved?

• use of blogs by corporations, or more specifically the use of blogging as a lite CMS to push greater amounts of twaddle at people who may be held responsible for paying attention to it. Oh, good, my RSS aggregator shows another visionary essay from the CEO, written by his PR flack, about our dedication to excellence. I'll read that as soon as I finish doing the work of the couple guys who got laid off the team.

  • Corporate Blogging

• the potential for millions of AOL-user blogs to appear. "Here's a picture of my cat eating cheesecake."

• the Always OnNetwork, and other efforts to make money off other people's writing. (Note how little Nick Denton pays the writers of the NanoPublishing ventures. But since Meg works for him, he gets some slack, maybe.) And the related argument of what is a blog when use to exclude certain efforts.

As Alex Golub commented to David Weinberger, the "What Is A WebLog" question is (ahem) a Red Herring.

As Dave Winer points out, WebLog software is part of a general trend of lowering the bar (in cost and effort) for Personal Publishing. And the joy of the web is that we don't have to care how much "bad" (to us) stuff gets created, because there's infinite shelfspace. So a million new AOLogs is great, because a couple are bound to be good.

• on the other hand, a million AOLers grabbing your RSS feed might not be what you had in mind. I think the Publish And Subscribe model will change in some weird ways. Or maybe we'll be begging AOL to cache for us (as long as we have no Business Model).

I consider Always OnNetwork (and SlashDot, and Kuro5hin) to be Virtual Community sites, not blogs. Remember years back when various online communities ran into some uproar when they tried to monetize their content in new and creative ways (like reprinting stuff in books)? Or just by smelling a little too sponsor-driven, even if there was no censoring/filtering going on?

Conversely, some of the blogging community were annoyed at how long it took Blogger to come up with any Revenue Model, because we knew they couldn't run on fumes forever, and didn't want them to fail.

But how can you tell the difference? A collection of blogs hosted on a single server like Userland Manila is technically not much different from a Virtual Community site with an "all entries written by Joe" feature. And note how most Radio Userland blogs have generic URLs like http://radio.weblogs.com/0107127/ (I'm definitely not implying that and UserLand tools do not generate blogs, I'm showing that there are some technical similarities.) Does the ability to make personal templates matter? If 90% of the users pick from just 10 template choices, is that personal enough? Does have any vague parts of a Terms Of Service matter?

• from Always OnNetwork: Publish, post, upload, distribute or disseminate any inappropriate, profane, defamatory, obscene, indecent or unlawful topic, name, material or information. Hmm, who defines "inappropriate"? Always On is under no obligation to post or use any Submission you may provide and Always On may remove any Submission at any time in its sole discretion.

If Tony Perkins followed David Weinberger's recommendations would his critics feel any better? I suspect not.

Maybe there's some kneejerk anti-commercialism

(more to come)

Playing in the sandbox --2003/06/11 22:27 GMT
Can VistorsMakeNewPages ?

Getting some Weird Opera results . . .

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