I attended the Triangle's Blogger Conference this morning. It was alright ... nothing too groundbreaking for me. (Notes from the conference are here)

In any case, the focus was mainly along the journalistic side of things - how does grassroots journalism work, how can big media deal with it, etc. etc. Honestly the discussion wasn't too enthralling (it seemed a bit unfocused; once in a while someone would bring up a point then someone else would speak about some previous point and then we'd go off on weird tangents), but it did get the gears in my mind to churn a bit (ooh, it's been a while).

This touches a lot on what Alice wrote a while ago (what is the purpose of this blog?), but I've noticed that in the case of blogging, there are two primarily type of bloggers in this world. There are those who blog for the purpose of developing their own social network and those who blog for the purpose of developing a better information architecture (those who promote grassroots journalism fall into the latter camp).

Both of these groups share two types of users: the realists and the idealists (ooh, I know, groundbreaking philosophizing going on here... just bear with me). The idealists are those who think the Internet, if given the proper tools, can uproot a lot of the status quo (wikipedia vs. encylopedias, grassroots journalism vs. big media) and create a "better" world. Realists share in some of the optimism, but take a much more grounded view of the situation - in all reality, a lot of the status quo will exist, but this new medium serves to complement, not replace.

The problem with the idealists is they have an oversimplified view of the economics of the situation - the point was brought up rather obviously when someone bemoaned the fact that the NYTimes would not grant access to online archives for free - this person suggested that "opening up the archive online and putting advertisements next to them would become a cash-cow." Right.

Dan Gillmor quickly rebutted this point (rather politely, as far as I could tell) by quoting someone who said that this notion was "laughable." In any case, the point is that there are a lot of people who still believe that everything on the Internet should be free - "hey, the only cost is running the server, right?" Again, I've touched on this many times - but many idealists have a sense of entitlement when it comes to websites.

Backtracking a bit, I've realized that a lot of the power of any blogging revolution lies straight in the hands of the tool publishers. Movable Type, LiveJournal, Wikis... the development of these tools directly led to their adoption by the media. It's interesting to see that a lot of thinking among the media crowd is how to "improve" existing tools rather than thinking of new tools, but I guess that's why people like Dave Winer are important - they can straddle that line between the social implications of a tool but still develop new technologies which benefit the masses.

In regards to masses, someone made the point that still a very small percentage of users blog. This is what I'm primarily interested in, and I was quite saddened to see no real discussion on how to improve adoption of blogs among the non-technological crowds. Although the popularity of blogs has exploded due to word-of-mouth associations, those who have blogged with great frequency are those who have others there to moral support - that's to say that if you want to really get Person A blogging, you need Person B, who is already an established blogger, there to give them help and give comments to their posts.

People will not blog unless they get feedback (which makes me wonder if I should just create an automatic bot that goes around Tabulas and goes LOL, Great Post, I agree!, Just Blog Hopping in order to give people a sense of empowerment?) and they feel they are getting "something" from it.

Which begs the question, should everyone blog? I used to think the obvious answer was, "yes." But lately I've decided that a lot of what people have to say is dull, uninteresting and stale (and this includes this site). Maybe part of the problem of the signal and noise ratio problem is the overenthusiasm of users with their blogs. This is the issue of the "echo chamber" effect that's been discussed. Essentially the problem is that your readers will be in the same social network: if Bob reads Jane's journal, and Jane posts a funny link, Bob may post that link on HIS page. On some levels, all social networks are incestuous, so no real content is being published. Old content is just being recycled within each encapsulated social ecosystem.

This brings me to my next point. There are two [two seems to be a magical number in this post!] methods in approaching blogging communities. One is the gated community method (Xanga, LJ, Tabulas) where registration is required and all data is stored centrally. The second option is the "I own the domain" version, where you host your own software on server space you rent. The benefits of each can be drawn to the analogy of big cities and rural settlements. Gated communities are bettering at moderating themselves - in a situation where a single entity controls your user information, people are more likely to be well-behaved. However, the drawbacks are in the limited features (you can only use what your service provides you!) and the signal to noise ratio is ridiculous. Look at the list of gated communities - do any of them have any writers who make solid contributions to the netsphere? The most influential bloggers run their own domains - but why is this? Why wouldn't influential bloggers have someone else manage that software for them? Most of them just use simple tools in any case!

I honestly think that the way to make money is through gated communities - you can try running a hosting company where you offer hosting to bloggers, but you'll be run into the ground due to the low margins already. Plus peopel hate setting up their own software. Perhaps the commercial success of the blogging industry lies within gated communities [I'd be interested to see 6A's revenue streams when it comes to MT vs. TypePad], while the people who really benefit from it all run their own domains.

There seems to be a general consensus that there are a lot of problems in the blogosphere (comment spam, signal-to-noise ratio), but the general attitude towards it all seems to be, "Let the tool builders deal with it." Unfortunately the tool builders are not rich enough to deal with the heuristical problems of comment spam (what *is* spam according to a computer?) or signal-to-noise ratio (the user-moderation of /. fails enormously when you don't consider "funny" comments to be a good thing).

The success for any online blogging community (in regards to tool development) will be a closer collaboration between sociologists (how can we best connect people with similar interests?), statistical analysts (how can we sift through all this data and figure out what is quality?), user interface designers (how can we make the tools easy to adopt by Joe Average?), technologists (what new tools can we devise which will be adopted by future generations?) and finally code monkeys (build the tools or you get no bananas!).

Oh yeah, I finally "got" podcasting. In a world where I write better than I speak, it's hard to imagine anyone wanting to podcast ... but there are a lot of people who speak and want to listen rather than read. Maybe one day I"ll add podcast support to Tabulas. I still think speech recognition is too weak to support this feature - if we could get a program that lets you speak into it that automatically generates a MP3 and a textual transcript ... that would be hot ish.