The Promise of Telepresence, the Reality of Blogs, and Scaling Problems

We are hardwired to understand subtle social signals. Complimenting the innate, there are complex forms of social pattern recognition learned as children that our minds instantly identify. A faint look of disinterest, a momentary glossiness of the eyes, and a muffled sigh all are immediately signals that a person has lost interest in a conversation topic. None of these instant feedback signals are available to web publishers and a merging of regular web logs with real time video feedback could provide valuable utility.

Blog Posts: A story is spun and left open

For bloggers the message may be reporting, analysis, or opinionated hypotheses followed by supporting evidence. The topics are intentionally left open in hopes of elucidating expert and amateur interpretation. The comments enrich a raw topic and help guide future post topics with unanswered questions. Personal blogs by people with interesting day jobs* have an anchor of realism attached to their tales. The blog isn’t just a soapbox or marketing tool, it’s an extension of the author’s beliefs and thoughts. Blog’s are an invitation for intelligent discourse, the origin of asynchronous conversations.

Popular and Relevant aren’t cut from the same cloth

Popular news sites aggregate authors and begin by trying to cover as much of a narrow topic as resources allow. Over time with site growth the conversations in comments are replaced by a “scan and move on” approach by most readers. As much as I enjoy a good post by Mike Arrington, MG Siegel, or Marshall Kirkpatrick I don’t expect them to regularly engage with readership much. We have to understand these folks are sometimes writing many posts a day, or busy doing vital business development. This means not much time if any time is left open for conversing with potentially hundreds of commenters under their deluge of posts. Modern blog aggregators have moved away from a social model towards the broadcast news model with a smattering of comments from regulars in hopes of initiating something resembling a conversation or debate.

Even popular solo bloggers like Robert Scoble and Fred Wilson have growing comment streams that surpass their time to respond to. Commenters are left to talk among themselves, which is scalable. Blogs can evolve into topical social web platforms where content comes from an enthusiastic audience as long as shared value is embedded into the DNA of the model.

Notes:
*= I’m sowing the seeds for a fascinating day job, where my heart and head are “all in”. Building a startup and business who’s culture is fueled by our teams sense of value is the prize.

References:
This post was induced by Jason Kolb’s Beyond Blogging brought to my attention via Louis Gray’s share.

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  • Leland

    I think the main thing that causes less community interaction / 1000 readers in larger websites is that current commenting systems and interaction tools make you feel like you are shouting into a hurricane when you want to interact. What is the point in making a comment when no one will reply to you, send a message or create a new relationship with you? The current systems most blogs and websites use for community interaction have severe limitations and seem to be stuck on the same “discussion” model as years gone by.

    The problem is reputation and giving members of the community the ability to perform meaningful actions on the website/blog. However, current systems have no system to measure the “trust” of a user. The current “point” systems and “thumbs up” buttons are very easy to exploit and game, and they do not represent how much trust you can put into someone very well.

    Giving community members stronger forms of interaction requires responsibility and trust, and a “click this button for reputation” system cannot indicate responsible members of a community.

    We are working very hard over here to bring a system that *can* indicate trust and responsibility of community members to blogs and websites. It's going to change the way large websites think of their communities. Instead of passive readers that consume content and move on, we will enable readers to become crucial to the success of a website.

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    Looking forward to your cut at a better way to community build. Right now I see the more successful sites grow too large for bloggers to effectively manage. Their attention doesn't scale and community responsibility is limited. Blogs aren't really read write beyond the post and comments.

    There are active attempts at scaling community engagement: connected chat rooms (wibiya bar), meet ups (avc map of meetups is groovy), wikis. Real community power can come in with focused projects, collaborative creations, etc.

  • Leland

    Mark, I also think that the chat room in the wibiya bar is great. But it has one massive problem… you are not “automatically” logged into the chat. Because of this, it is impossible for a “
    pull” connection between two readers who are on at the same time.

    If you want to grab chat functionality for us to chat around your blog (which i think is a great idea to get creative juices flowing and more interaction), take a look at http://ajaxim.com/ . When I went to their website to try out their chat, I had one of the most wonderful experiences I have ever had while passively reading a blog… While I was reading the instructions on how to install it, someone sent a message to me through the chat.

    I thought.. “What is this? Someone said hello to me? Is this a bot or advertisement? No it's not? Wow!”. This is the first time in over 17 years of being on the internet that I have been genuinely surprised in a positive way! The feeling of having someone say hello to you and talk to you about your opinion *in real time* and *at the location of the content* is amazing!

    By the way, what you said about successful sites growing too large to directly connect with their readers… I think this is the same problem that we have mostly solved in our real-life political system.

    It is impossible for the president to respond directly to every citizen; however, through a system of “reputation” (elected officials of a progressively higher position) single citizens can still make a difference and have their voices heard! Additionally, through becoming powerful, rich and/or famous, they can also have their voice heard.

    In current blogs, there is no opportunity for a “Hierarchy” to form, and there is also no way to gain personal power/fame/wealth/whatever on that blog in a way that would be visible to the writers of that blog/website. Therefore, as opposed to our real-life political system, readers on a blog or website that is sufficiently large will never have a chance to make any more of an impact then adding more words to a storm of noise.

    To see this storm of noise in action, I would suggest checking out the front page of http://www.newsweek.com . Their comment threads regularly go over 3000+ comments. A large majority of those comments seem to have over 15 minutes of time spent writing them. The comments that are left there sometimes have the quality and caliber of an actual blog/newspaper post in-of-themselves. Then multiply that by 3000.

    The system they are using has no organization, no reputation, and, like I previously stated, no way for individuals to have any impact whatsoever.

    Thus, attempting to interact there is simply throwing more noise into an already chaotic hurricane of opinions and text. The only benefit I can see from spending 20 minutes writing an in-depth comment would be so that I personally feel that, yes indeed, I got my words out. And hopefully one or two people saw those words and were affected by them. Too bad that I can never see if my comment actually had any effect.

    In conclusion, I think that there IS a better way to orchestrate and form communities around a blog and website; the horrible 10 year old zero reputation, zero hierarchy and zero potential action model of commenting and interaction that has so far been regurgitated over the last few years must be improved and demolished.

    I'm tired of seeing 3000+ sized comment streams that end up wasting thousands of man hours for no foreseeable purpose.

    (Thanks for your reply mark.. it really helped to get my mind thinking in terms of metaphor and extended values)