roy

There's some talk in the Washington Post about whether blogging as a trend has peaked. I think that (Damn you, Steph) Given the state of the tools, I'd have a hard time disagreeing. For the sake of simplicity, I'll only be addressing the state of remotely hosted tools (as opposed to "install-it-yourself," which I've always felt would appear only to fringe users). Three years ago, TypePad, which was a huge boon to people who didn't want to deal with the "childishness" of LiveJournal (and its sister clones), the immaturity of Xanga, and the pain of installing MT or b2.

Since then, have we seen a real growth in the remotely hosted tools? I signed up for TypePad this past summer, and the service hadn't seemed to really grown by any leaps and bounds since its launch. This is understandable, given its success, that 6A (the company that owns TypePad) would spend more time on dealing with internal scalability issues rather than feature growth. AOL launched AOL Journals, MSN launched MSN Spaces, Yahoo launched 360 ... but these were all simply products which took a laundry list of features and implemented then with some close integration with their existing family line of products (MSN with MSN Messenger + MSN Spaces, for example).

The problem now is that the A-list bloggers (Scoble, Jarvis, Winer) are far more concerned with emerging technologies like podcasting; who really spends time writing about "textual" blogging anymore? The early adopters have moved onto greener pastures, and now there's no enthusiasm or innovation in the general blogging sites. The big players now in this field (MSN, 6A, Xanga) are more concerned with developing a business model from these sites, which generally leads to risk-aversion when it comes to features and UI work.

But here's the kicker. If you eliminate the journalism-type bloggers, there is a HUGE group of people who just want to keep their personal journals online. That's it. And very few of these people want to pay a huge monthly fee to write online; the last thing anybody needs is for an avenue of escape to start feeling like an obligation ("Oh shit, I paid $6 this month, better write!).

I haven't seen any work on this, but if Technorati is closely tracking LiveJournal and Xanga blogs, a noticeable amount of growth in past years simply could be linked to the creation of multiple accounts by the same people. I know one of the boons for Tabulas is the ability to change your username - friends I know that use LJ and Xanga were constantly deleting and creating new accounts during the past years to 'escape' previous personas.

But why would these people stop blogging now? Why would these people who have invested nearly 2-3 years in a platform just stop?

My personal experience is the total lack of feature innovation (for privacy controls) among the mass toolmakers. Many of my friends have now learned the hard way that things you post online do come back and bite you on the butt. When I've asked my friends why they've stopped blogging, an answer I hear quite often is, "It's not private enough online so I just keep it in MS Word." But they *want* to share. The whole allure of blogging in the first place is the ability to reach out and connect to a greater group of people - my friends have just realized that because they can't control which group of people to reach out to, they rather just not blog to anybody at all, which takes us right back to 1999.

The problem is not limited just to publishing. It also comes down to the consuming of feeds.

I have a theory when it comes to these groups - the more people that join an immediate social network, the less willing people are to contribute to that network. When you KNOW your post is being read by a smaller group of people, you're more willing to participate in the network. The more friends you have on a site, the less willing you are to visit every page to see if a page has been updated. This has been why the first boon to personal bloggers was the concept of a "friends" page (which I believe Brad was the first to implement on a alrge-scale); now people could read all of their friends' stuff on one page! Awesome!

But this has limited people to networks. I can't read my Xanga friends' on my LJ page (well, technically I can with RSS feeds, but not in any easy way), and the same goes for any other site. But I can sign up for a RSS aggregator like Bloglines and track everybody there! Unfortunately, this method is only adopted by early adopters like me, because people fear the learning curves of new sites.

So what's the next step? Toolmakers need to build in comparable feed consuming tools into their tools. People should be able to go to Xanga and easily track their LJ friends. People in Tabulas should be able to track both - and people shouldn't be aware that this is some new concept called "RSS" (cause that makes no sense to them). It should simply be called "Subscriptions."

But the barrier to creating this type of feature is high. For this to happen, sites like Tabulas need to build a crawler, a RSS feed parser (given the ambiguity and the different flavours of RSS, not an easy task) and then some method of storing this data in a scalable manner. Given the recent tussles in the RSS world regarding the spec, I'm not even sure I want to get into that. Supporting Atom would be an easier task, except adoption still isn't widespread.

Here's the bulleted summary of this post:

• People have stopped trusting and using blogging tools because of the lack of privacy controls (and the inability to export data, but that's another story)
• The stagnation among the featureset of general blogging tools is due to the maturity of the industry and the need to monetize the business, except most people don't want to pay. It also doesn't help that those in the greatest position to publicize and push for a higher standard of quality like A-list bloggers are obsessed with plugging Ajax, Web 2.0 products.
• People have stopped reading blogs because the tools they are familiar with (Xanga, LJ, Tabulas) don't offer an integrated way of consuming feeds, and people are not happy with signing up "for another site" just to read sites. With more of their friends signing up, it simply becomes too time consuming to keep track of all their friends, so people generally give up.

And those are the problems.