I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about where blogging is headed and some of the problems in the current state affairs. Blogging has come along way, but we’ve only hit the tip of the iceberg with where we are headed. We need to continue to pull the audience in with engaging content and spark debate/discussion. Here are few key issues and questions that we need to focus on.
Conversations not Comments
What’s really lacking right now is interaction. A blogger writes a post and then publishes it to his/her blog. From there, the audience posts comments at their leisure (if you are lucky). In fact, the majority of readers don’t comment they just peruse. On top of that, comments usually trickle in over days not hours. What we need are tools to facilitate conversations between bloggers and their audience. Now, I’m not just talking about adding chat – let’s get a little creative. I’ll leave this one for you to think about.
Mixing & Mashing of Content
It should be easy to quote other blogs, create derivative works, embed videos/photos, integrate text messaging, music etc. This list goes on and on. Yes, the technology is coming along, but we still have some work to do.
Let’s talk a bit more about two of these – quoting other blogs and creating derivative works. Right now if you’d like to quote a blog typically you’d copy and paste the content into your blog post, and probably provide a link to the original blog (same goes for derivative works). It would be nice to have blog posts from different blogs aggregated together in one conversation. I know what you are thinking, why don’t you just add links? Because links suck. You wind up 3-4 levels deep and can’t figure out where you came from and how to get back. As the original creator of that blog post I might want to know you are using my content or somehow include it in my statistics. Maybe even include an advertisement with it. Another problem is for the audience member reading the blog. It is annoying and incredibly boring when you read about the same topic in 5 different blogs. Why not connect the dots somehow and display them together by topic? Then I don’t have to read 10 different posts on 10 different blogs about how Chad Hurley mentioned in Davos that YouTube will be including ads in videos. I’m also not talking about search, but rather a self-organizing wikipedia-like blog tool.
Connecting with & Building Relationships with your Audience
MyBlogLog has done some good work in this area. It’s amazing that just by having a photo next to your profile you start to realize that a reader is actually a human being. Why not get to know your audience better? I’m not just talking about connecting on LinkedIn. How about learning where they’re from, backgrounds or how you could better produce content they’d be interested in? Ever take a post request from your audience? The guys over at Ask the VC are. Not only can your audience learn from you, but the same goes for you of them.
Wrap-up
To be honest, I don’t particularly enjoy writing blog posts. What I do love is expressing myself online, and a blog gives me that voice. On the flip side, I truly am energized from reading blogs and learning new things everyday. I can hardly sit still thinking about it. I learn more from blogs and gain access to insights that I never could have otherwise. Blogging is truly changing the world and will continue to. So hold on to your hats…we’re just getting started.
What do you think? Agree / disagree? Want to get going?
