New Blogging 2.0 Paradigm: What Is It?

I saw Louis Gray’s post about Blogging 2.0 Causing Friction with 1.0 and it spoke right to a thought I have been having for the last few days. I sent the link to Rich (who writes for me over on PCMech). This is a compilation of Rich’s remarks from our chat:

The single largest problem with web 2.0 social media is that it almost exclusively relies on external services.
i.e. your domain is essentially worthless because it doesn’t do anything on its own.
And if any one of those services breaks, *you* are broken at that point.
Good example: today’s nerd-out with twitter.
My feeling is that web 2.0 completely defeats the notion of having a domain to begin with.
It is just too easy to lose your identity because it relies on external services just to keep it going.
In web 2.0 world, davidrisley.com is nothing but a placeholder.
The identity is held with other social services and the domain is seen as a roadblock.

Rich agrees with Louis’s post (as do I), but he refers to himself as a blogger 1.5.

But, Louis Gray speaks truth. There are big changes afoot in the world of blogging. Now, I have little doubt that Louis Gray sees me as a solid 1.0 blogger. My blog posts about FriendFeed noise and how Disqus scatters your comments, no doubt, make me seem very 1.0 in terms of how Gray defines it. But, yes and no…

Gray is correct in that there IS value in participating in these social media services. After all, Gray himself points out that it all refers traffic back to his blog. Robert Scoble has gone so far as to post much more on these social services than on his own blog, so Scoble is the epitome of blogger 2.0. I, myself, obviously use Twitter and Friendfeed. Why? Because I’m not a frickin’ idiot, that’s why. There are a boatload of people on those services and I’d be a complete and total moron not to participate there if I call myself a blogger.

So, calling Friendfeed noisy in no way means I don’t see the value of it. Gray says:

You can spot those living in Blogging 1.0 as they’re the ones railing about keeping all their comments on their blog, and they’re the ones saying that FriendFeed or Twitter have absolutely no value, and complaining about the noise.

This is a simple minded statement. Is there not room for a person who says FriendFeed is noisy AND it is valuable? Why is this an either/or scenario, Louis? These kinds of posts are what causes the friction he speaks of.

There is a friction between 2.0 and 1.0, but there is a big grey area in between. Blogging 2.0 is not necessarily new and improved, as you would expect of a higher version number. It’s just different. We’re talking decentralization versus centralization. We’re talking controlled identity versus uncontrolled. But those 1.0 concepts aren’t going anywhere. They will be here for some time and it has nothing to do with being a knuckle-dragging, artifact of a blogger.

But, what does the NEW world of blogging look like? Where do I think we’re going? To me, I think the blog, as an online entity, isn’t going anywhere. It will continue to be the hub of conversation. For example, the hub of all of my online activity is this blog. What takes place on FriendFeed is auxiliary noise. IMPORTANT noise, yes. Noise which leads to traffic to this blog, yes. Important networking, absolutely! But, it will never replace the centralization of the blog. The blog represents what I do in the office while Twitter and Friendfeed are what I do when I’m out at social events. Twitter and FriendFeed are not replacements for a central online identity.

It is great to see this social media transition and the evolution of blogging 2.0, as Gray terms it. However, people like Gray need to not make the mistake of assuming the “old” way of doing things is incorrect. After all, we do live in the real world where online upstarts fail, so bringing up comment handover to Disqus is a valid point. Bringing up the noise level of social media is a perfectly valid point and in no way removes from the value of those services. But, those services are not going to replace the centralization of a blog, the idea that comments on a blog are a good thing and that, yes, we DO want traffic to our blogs.

Perhaps a 2.0 blogger is going to be like the guy in V for Vendetta. Everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

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