A VC - Latest Comments in The One Way Nature Of Blogs

Re: The One Way Nature Of Blogs

Andy Parker — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 12:04:58 -0000

Fred,

I love your blog and read it all the time. Quite honestly, I don't know how you do it. I'm a busy guy but I suspect you're equally busy and yet you still have time to blog, twitter, comment on music, post photos. And you are one of my sources for "really interesting stuff". I hope I figure out how to do it someday :-) But thanks so much for your time, energy, focus... I truly appreciate it.

Re: The One Way Nature Of Blogs

Dan Entin — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 10:58:21 -0000

Sorry - only first saw this reply now (disqus is cool but I wish it notified me when there was a reply to my comment).

I am 32. I was a moderate Friendster user in the past, created a MySpace account a while back but was horrified at the user experience and then created a Facebook account as soon as it opened up but have only recently begun using it more. It's not as useful a network for me as I'd like as many of my friends (even those who had used Friendster) are not (yet) using Facebook. But I have 127 friends vs. 1 on Twitter (again, I think recreating networks for media platforms is impractical).

I think people use their FB status updates in a variety of ways but you're right in that they're less blog-like in content, but I think they can be more than just like an IM status. If you want to see what mine look like here is the feed: http://www.facebook.com/fee...

Re: The One Way Nature Of Blogs

Abhishek — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 02:24:52 -0000

Fred,

I completely agree with your sentiments on the subject. Interestingly I have been thinking about this problem for quite some time. However when I read the news about Automattic (WordPress developers) acquisition of Gravatar, I thought this problem can be solved.
WordPress can do it in a straightforward way. Here is my assessment. Take a look and let me know what you think.

http://abhishek.tiwari.com/...

Abhishek

Re: The One Way Nature Of Blogs

Kevin Traywick — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 21:19:58 -0000

At one point, several of my geographically-distant friends kept blogs and I actively tracked them. It became easier with some tools but eventually, it felt like work. I went back to rotating through the phone list and calling them on Sunday which, for me, is more intimate and far more compelling - I mean, some of them can really tell a story! - I guess my point is two-fold, one, I think blogs work against your personal relationships by reducing the need to interact but do a great job at letting me get to know in a stranger at a distance. For all the hyperbole about Web2.0, in this world full of misunderstandings between strangers, that's pretty great. My second ponit is that if you try to keep up with all your friends by reading their blogs, you'll have a 6th job this week Fred.

Re: The One Way Nature Of Blogs

fredwilson — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 08:34:21 -0000

that's disqus and that's why i've moved to their service from typepad's own comment system

Re: The One Way Nature Of Blogs

vanelsas — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 05:08:44 -0000

Hi Fred, I feel exactly the same as you do. I like interaction, and one of the ways to do that is look past the blog posts into the comments. If people take the time to write up a comment than it shows interest to me, and for me a reason either start following them or at least reply to the comment. I wrote a post a few days ago in response to Tim O'Reilly's comment that the blogosphere is becoming a self fulfilling prophesies with everyone looking at the same sources and scooping the same news. Interaction is a way to get out of that vacuum, it creates new ideas, new relationships. If interested you can find it here:
http://vanelsas.wordpress.c...

Re: The One Way Nature Of Blogs

Jimmy Soho — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 04:44:40 -0000

Hi Fred,

Therefor we need a commenting service. You should be able to say: hey, instead of managing the comments myself, have the commenting service manage comments to my blog. Via the commenting service you should then be able to see all past comments of a commenter across all blogs. If this commenting service is open enough I'm sure all the major blogging software would support this

[ . ] Have this blog software manage your comments
[ X ] Manage my comments via the world wide commenting service

Jimmy

Re: The One Way Nature Of Blogs

Jimmy Soho — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 04:36:59 -0000

The above comment kind of defeats its own argument. You are commenting here on a post from Fred, you're not commenting in facebook.

Re: The One Way Nature Of Blogs

candice — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 02:14:51 -0000

I don't know if it's age based. I'm 26 and don't like facebook that much, and I'm even taking classes. My boyfriend is a year or so out of college and hates facebook, though he has a blog. I know several hundred people who are on there, but it's just not that useful to me, too much upkeep. My page is on autopilot.

Twitter on the other hand, is no work whatsoever, and great.

Re: The One Way Nature Of Blogs

David G — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 22:18:43 -0000

Great post - personally I far prefer leaving comments to writing blog posts.CoComment used to do a fairly good job of archiving comments e.g. you can see my (Zillow related) comments here: http://www.cocomment.com/co.... Unfortunately, they've overdone it a bit lately and I find the site too noisy - but yes, organizing blog comment content is a huge opportunity.

Re: The One Way Nature Of Blogs

vruz — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 19:42:03 -0000

I agree Twitter may be the closest thing to blogging, without the overhead and involvement that proper blogging requires.

Re: The One Way Nature Of Blogs

Thomas Purves — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 16:05:28 -0000

I am 31, but I am also Canadian. The Facebook demographic is much different in Canada (and everywhere else in the world _except_ the USA) where here facebook is more representative and not dominated by the college crowd.

Also 1 in 5 of all Canadians(!) is on facebook, so we're an odd case in that regard, or an interest petri dish for looking at the future of a society saturated by social networking.

That being said, some of us are beginning to show signs of facebook fatigue. All the new apps on facebook are starting to dilute the social value of facebook with a lot of social spam and not especially entertaining distraction. Hopefully, facebook will somehow address this.

Either way however, the point holds that facebook has grown far faster than blogging and it has cannibalized a lot the more personal and social side of blogging behaviour.

Re: The One Way Nature Of Blogs

obscurelyfamous — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 16:02:54 -0000

I've always seen it that way as well. There's this mini-blogging experience to twitter (similar to making a small post on a tumblog). I'm glad that my tumblr and my facebook status gets updated with just a single tweet action.

Re: The One Way Nature Of Blogs

oraboy — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 15:49:36 -0000

I agree that is part of the magic of blogging and it'll never go away.

But there is value in a something complementary that allows people to congregate at a particular time and engage in more real time conversation ...

Re: The One Way Nature Of Blogs

RacerRick — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 15:09:15 -0000

Someone should run an editor service where they proof blogs and have ability to log in and change grammar, spelling etc.

Re: The One Way Nature Of Blogs

Chris O'Donnell — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 14:42:43 -0000

I disagree that the asynchronous nature of blogging is a bug. It's a feature! The odds of me being available at the same time as one of my readers is slim. I'm busy, they are busy, we could be separated by multiple time zones, etc. The ability of a conversation to happen in spite of those hurdles is the real magic of blogging.

Re: The One Way Nature Of Blogs

fredwilson — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 14:06:02 -0000

well i'll start by recommending tony alva's blog and jackson's blog
http://agropragmo.blogspot....
http://thiskids.blogspot.com/

i also like Blue Girl
http://bluegirlredstate.typ...

and chartreuse is a little better know, but for some reason never appears on techmeme
http://chartreuse.wordpress...

you've inspired me to write a post on blogs like theirs which i promise to do at some point

fred

Re: The One Way Nature Of Blogs

oraboy — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 13:56:13 -0000

I agree with the sentiment Fred. Blogs are a one-way, asynchronous communication medium so they're not the best way for people to stay in touch, connect & engage (billboard vs. meetings).

Blog comments are great but they are still asynchronous and don't allow for real conversations (swapping sticky notes on the wall vs. having a discussion). IMHO, next innovations in this space would allow for more real-time engagements between the blogger and his community of readers.

BTW: I'm sure there are many people (like me :-) that are faithful follows of you and your blog that you don't know about... maybe you can do a quick survey asking people to tell you if they read your blog and why. Contribute a few cents into the google-reader-blog-popularity-stats going on in the blogsphere.

Re: The One Way Nature Of Blogs

fredwilson — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 13:54:21 -0000

there is something about twitter updating that feels more like blog posting. facebook status updating feels like updating status on IM to me. but maybe that again is a generational thing as i alluded to above.

fred

Re: The One Way Nature Of Blogs

fredwilson — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 13:51:17 -0000

i am curious how old you two are (thomas and danentin). I don't really use facebook as hard as i try to. is it a generational thing? i blog, read blogs, twitter away incessantly, but only visit facebook about once a week. and i have 193 friends on facebook and 363 unanswered friend requests. so it's not that i don't have a social network there, it's just that i don't find it useful.

fred

Re: The One Way Nature Of Blogs

robjohnson — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 13:21:08 -0000

Intense Debate provides the ability to subscribe to anyone's comments across any intense debate enabled blog. they also let you define your friends in their system and provide a feed of all your friends' comments. disclaimer -- I know the guys and think they're pretty smart.

Re: The One Way Nature Of Blogs

fredwilson — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 12:57:01 -0000

That last line summarizes my feelings exactly

Fred

Re: The One Way Nature Of Blogs

fredwilson — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 12:57:01 -0000

Oops. Gotta fix that. I realize that typos are a regular ocurrence on this blog and apologize for that

Fred

Re: The One Way Nature Of Blogs

Dan Entin — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 12:30:37 -0000

What's the value in using Twitter if you're updating your Facebook status? Like you said you already have your 800 friends on FB why try and get them to join another network when you can already achieve the same thing with Facebook itself? If it's the mobile piece you can update Facebook status from your cell phone web browser and save yourself the SMS charge.

Re: The One Way Nature Of Blogs

Dan Entin — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 12:28:22 -0000

I tend to agree with Thomas. I find that I am updating my Facebook status far more often than my blog and I know that my friends are reading what I'm up to because I'll get a wall post or message from them in response.