There's plenty of evidence that people who are very into social media tend also to be committed neophiles, rushing after the latest, greatest thing on the internet and assuming that it will supplant that which came before. It's all nonsense, of course, as good tools will continue to have their place even as new ones come along.
I've been reminded of this in one of my other blogging lives as a World of Warcraft blogger. In the last six months the number of bloggers in that particular blogosphere has grown exponentially, to the point where it's become hard to keep up with it.
One blogger, Phaelia of Resto4Life came up with a solution that's so simple and effective that the idea seems blindingly obvious, but only in retrospect: she set up a forum. She then kicked started the community by inviting bloggers she'd already interacted with to join, who then posted about it on their blogs, so the bloggers who read them came and join and, lo, a community was born.
Except, the community wasn't born - it already existed. It was just hungry for another way to communicate, one that supplemented the "public" communication between the blogs. In effect, the creation of Blog Azeroth enabled a level of meta-discussion around a social object - in this case the activity of blogging, rather the subject that they're blogging about. It's without doubt one of the cleverest pieces of blog/forum interaction I've seen in a while, which has created a new site which is helping drive traffic to all the participating bloggers.
In fact, it's such I neat idea that I decided to ask Phae how the idea came about:
First up: what was the motivation for starting the site?
"Well, Bellwether was lamenting the fact that she and I kept writing about similar things and wished there were a way for druids to get together and talk once a month... I figured that gettng together on forums would be way better than once a month, but I decided I wouldn't want to exclude other great bloggers simply because they weren't druids."
You have an extremely well-read and popular WoW blog. Are you worried about diluting your audience by encouraging more WoW bloggers?
"Not at all; if I were even remotely worried about that, I wouldn't constantly introduce new Druid blogs to my readers. I know that to earn and keep a healthy readership, I have to create worthwhile, entertaining, and/or educational content. A class-based blogosphere feeds upon itself... positively. And with RSS feeds and readers, there's absolutely no reason NOT to introduce new blogs!"
What do you hope the site will achieve going forwards?
"Increased camaraderie and information sharing among bloggers, helping new bloggers get their feet wet, and a blogosphere-wide increase in quality and, in turn, readership. Also, world (of warcraft) peace between horde and alliance."
Nice write-up and interesting interview with Phaelia. I'm glad you asked the question about competitiveness and I agree with Phae's answer 100%. RSS readers kind of eliminate the need to squash out the competition since everyone has a chance to push their content and readers don't get blog fatigue or forget to stop by.
Well, I had an ulterior motive in asking that question. It's one of the things that journalists really struggle with - they're so used to other publications in the same subject area being the unmentionable enemy that co-operative traffic boosting is a strange, uncomfortable idea for them.
Good stuff, but scary intro. A few weeks back I discovered that the diagnosis of 'change addict' fitted my behavioural pattern a bit too well, am I a committed neophile too? Good thing my main editor is a bit of a neophile too, or else I could easily see myself become utterly unemployable (and I've already got enough problems explaining why I've flitted all over the world, gone from columnist to reporter instead of the other way around, not gone the traditional local newspaper route etc etc)...
I don't think either of us are right on the cutting edge of neophile behaviour. We don't rush from blogging platform to blogging platform, or declare that blogging is dead and replaced by Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr or whatever.
We're more on the early implementer scale - not on the technological bleeding edge, but figuring out how to apply the new concepts to existing industries.
Put in that perspective you're compeletely right of course, but if I were to declare blogs dead in favour of twitter on this Northern frontier, most people wouldn't even understand what I was talking about (if I declared blogs dead in favour of Facebook however, all the journalists who've flocked to Facebook but never saw the point of blogs would embrace me). But no, am definently not on the cutting edge of neophile behaviour, am more of a translator btwn new and established, but it's also a matter of context. Several of my editor friends, incl one or two UK ones, can't get their heads around why I bother blogging (and hence give things away for free). But we're back to that old frustration of talking social media to those who still live in some bygone age mentally. Better go do some blogging about all the weird and wonderful media changes instead...