Mena Trott on blogging to small circles of friends
Mena Trott (co-designer of MovableType and TypePad) gave a talk this week at a blogging convention in Vienna:
Blogs, Bandwidth and Banjos: Tightly Knit Bonds In Weblogging
It really is a nice talk, but the odd and amusing thing about it for me is the wide-eyed novelty with which she looks at the LiveJournal style of small-scale friend-oriented blogging. The piece leads up to a sort of epiphany that:
"Well, it took a couple years to realize that I didn't in fact want to write and reach tens of thousands. I wanted to reach 10 or 20 people, my close friends and family and a handful of webloggers I communicated with in real life (also known as friends)."
It's still odd to me how marginalized and little-known LiveJournal is in the blogging community. It seems to be written off as a place where semi-literate teenage girls write about their crushes. (Well, OK, it is that, but only 90% of it.) But every once in a while someone like Clay Shirky actually looks closely and sees how much richer the social model here is than in a typical blog:
"I wanted to reach a smaller audience, an intimate audience. Clay Shirky gave a talk at the first Emerging Tech conference in California and explained that on LiveJournal, a diary/weblogging service that has a fairly young user base, the average number of friends a livejournaler has is about 6 to 12. This amazed us since we assumed, that their behaviour and linking patterns would be similar to webloggers. Blogrolls tend to be long and visitor traffic is coveted. Communication in groups of 6 or 12 is easy to maintain. These magic numbers work online and offline."
And maybe the rest of the blog world will start heading in a similar direction:
"... Of course, to make this possible, tools need to evolve. Many weblogging tools now provide mechanisms for password-protecting a weblog; but not that many allow you to assign a more granular level of control. But it's perfectly reasonable to think that you might have a weblog where you post both about the sandwich that you ate for lunch-a post intended for, and readable by, only a handful of people-and your thoughts on a new piece of technology from Apple, intended for a mass audience. These two pieces of content can and should co-exist, but one should be visible to a small audience, and the other to a large audience.
Blogs, Bandwidth and Banjos: Tightly Knit Bonds In Weblogging
It really is a nice talk, but the odd and amusing thing about it for me is the wide-eyed novelty with which she looks at the LiveJournal style of small-scale friend-oriented blogging. The piece leads up to a sort of epiphany that:
"Well, it took a couple years to realize that I didn't in fact want to write and reach tens of thousands. I wanted to reach 10 or 20 people, my close friends and family and a handful of webloggers I communicated with in real life (also known as friends)."
It's still odd to me how marginalized and little-known LiveJournal is in the blogging community. It seems to be written off as a place where semi-literate teenage girls write about their crushes. (Well, OK, it is that, but only 90% of it.) But every once in a while someone like Clay Shirky actually looks closely and sees how much richer the social model here is than in a typical blog:
"I wanted to reach a smaller audience, an intimate audience. Clay Shirky gave a talk at the first Emerging Tech conference in California and explained that on LiveJournal, a diary/weblogging service that has a fairly young user base, the average number of friends a livejournaler has is about 6 to 12. This amazed us since we assumed, that their behaviour and linking patterns would be similar to webloggers. Blogrolls tend to be long and visitor traffic is coveted. Communication in groups of 6 or 12 is easy to maintain. These magic numbers work online and offline."
And maybe the rest of the blog world will start heading in a similar direction:
"... Of course, to make this possible, tools need to evolve. Many weblogging tools now provide mechanisms for password-protecting a weblog; but not that many allow you to assign a more granular level of control. But it's perfectly reasonable to think that you might have a weblog where you post both about the sandwich that you ate for lunch-a post intended for, and readable by, only a handful of people-and your thoughts on a new piece of technology from Apple, intended for a mass audience. These two pieces of content can and should co-exist, but one should be visible to a small audience, and the other to a large audience.