Boyd's thesis was this: blogs are an unequal power environment. The blogger has control. Commenters can leave comments, but usually can't edit them or remove them. The blogger more often gains reputation from the comment than the blogger does. The rise of Disqus and CoComment have been a response to that.In parallel, the rise of RSS means that fewer regular readers actually visit your blog, divorcing them from the commenting experience. The ability to recommend and share content through readers creates a further community of readers who are even more detached from the actual comments.
It's all about the collective action of a group of people who annotate and rate:
- Digg: human recommendation
- Techmeme: algorithmic analysis for linking behaviour of A-list bloggers.
Comments in these sites do not find their way back to the blogs. And the comments on blogs are all but invisible.
Now, "flow" apps, like Twitter or the Facebook status is a much more egalitarian environment. Boyd suggests that once you get used to these flow apps, it gets harder and harder to go back to blogs. Purely doing blogs/comments seems antiquated once you're used to the flow...
If the community all move to a flow service, you don't lose your friendships.
A second wave of defection. The first was the move from mainstream media to social media. The second wave takes us from blogs to the flow. We leave behind the feudal hierarchy of blog publishers into an environment where a blog post is just one more bit of content in the flow.
Flow apps:
- Snackr - flow app for Google Reader
- Twhirl - flow app for Twitter, FriendFeed and others
- FriendFeed and Flickr have just added flow feeds.
Net result: huge fragmentation of existing blog communities into small communities. Medium term, Disqus et al will start to bring this commentary back to the blog. That's just plugging a broken house.
This changes working practices - you don't "do" these flow sites/apps - they're just there all the time. Cognitively, we're being changed by the tools we use.
The Web of Flow
Static pages become, essentially, an archive. The URL is less interesting as a static location on the web, and more as a unique identifier in the flow. Everything starts to merge, a comment looks like a recommendation looks like a bookmark...
Ads - affiliate link in a comment, I get the money. Flow my content anywhere, but carry this text ad. If you don't, I won't let my content flow into that app.
We need to move to an environment like the internet - which doesn't care about the kind of content, it just moves packets around. The social web isn't like that yet. But it needs to be.
Nice photos, Adam, and a good write-up.
As I commented over on the Crowdvine page for the session:
"One question I'm now pondering is that as the web evolves towards flow, and the apps go in the same direction - is there a danger of a gap forming between people's ability to deal with flowing information (continuous partial attention etc) and be productive, and the tools and web of flow itself?"
Oh, there I go fragmenting the comments and stuff :-)
I should probably reply to this on Twitter. :)
For me, blogs are for information and input, the flow is more of a random conversation. Very rarely adds to my knowledge (unless it points me back somewhere) but makes me feel connected. Different uses, different information sets.
Lovely work on this conference blogging lark Adam ;)
If you are using coComment, very soon your comments will be posted on Twitter and FriendFeed.