Unit Structures Fred Stutzman’s thoughts about information, social networks and technology.

In-Between Places

This morning, I was reading an interesting post from Chris Messina. In it, he talks about his in-between blogging behavior. Messina says:

I also screenshot as a way of in-between blogging, I guess. Y’know, like Twitter, Tumblr, Ma.gnolia, Plazes and Last.fm (among others) are all forms of in-between blogging. They’re where I am in the absences between longer posts (such as this one) where I record what I’m up to, what I’m seeing and what’s interesting to me.

As I sat back a little from that statement, I started wondering just when exactly blogging lost the battle for the in-between places. In the very beginning, we starting blogging because blogging made publishing easy; before blogging, we were marking up HTML and uploading it. With this revolution in simplicity came expectations – that we’d blog a certain way, that we’d have a set of links to famous bloggers on our blogs, etc. These expectations marked a recomplication of the medium, a depersonalization of sorts.

Another complication of blogging that arose was discoverability. If blogging is a personal medium, how do we find the blogs of people we care about (or are relevant to our interest areas). Looking at our feedreaders, we read the blogs of people we don’t know because it’s often hard to find bloggers we do know (San Francisco, you don’t count here). A blog search engine can find a million entries matching a certain word or topic, but it generally can’t find my friends or neighbors, or other people I care about.

Let me place a caveat by saying that these problems aren’t really deal-breakers to lots of people, and moreso there are lots of real world analogies. I don’t know John Markoff but I’ll always pay attention to his articles when I come across them. Many people don’t know Michale Arrington, but they enjoy Techcrunch, and the communities that grow up around these extremely central places.

However, as Messina describes, blogging is losing out to the in-between places. What are these in-between places? Well, they are social networks, the attention streams, Twitter, Tumblr, and so on. Unlike blogging, where your words are cast to an ether, these in-between spaces are inherently friend-centric. You explicitly build your networks in these services; furthermore, the onus isn’t on creating the networks of the largest size. Rather, the important thing is to create the network of most personal relevance to you. Compared to blogging, these spaces are less complicated and more relevant. To these networks, you can quickly and easily share the things more appropriate for the in-between: links you enjoy, quick updates, one-off thoughts. This is Dunbar’s grooming, an absolutely essential part of the friend maintenance process.

Rather than purely looking at this as blogging “losing”, we may consider these in-between tools as affording us new ways to enrich and deepen friendships. At the same time, they are places where the content is purely relevant to us, because the networks are made up of people we care about. This type of friend maintenance is something that many patterns of blogging don’t afford.

Examining my own behavior, I can identify a number of areas where blogging is losing to the in-between places. It seems that that places like Twitter and del.icio.us are moving from social backchannels to unique primary channels. This marks an advancement in the way we converse online; rather than using the brute-force, one-size-fits-all of blogging, we’re moving our conversations to the more relevant spaces. This transition is interesting and powerful, and it marks an advancement of our online communication behavior.

And, as regards the construction of a personalized cumulative identity, a new challenge for solo sites is to bring together the various, disparate in-betweens. More here: http://tbrown.org/noted/blogging-with-magnolia

Great post, Fred.

A fragment of this came up at the Social Software Symposium last December. David Weinberger brought up the differences between blogging and profile systems. Blogging to younger people and people new to these sharing tools seems old school.

As I have been thinking about it since Bloggers were the pioneers staking out homesteads and now that the wild frontier of the Web is getting settled, people are not wanting to build their own homes and rough it by managing their own existence, they like the conveniences of the suburbs and housing tracts.

Our attention gets more and more fragmented as we find new and multiple ways to filter, tune in, and surround with what we are interested in. I am linked in, twittery, blog loving, and none of it seems to fit together just yet.

I enjoyed your post, but I also have a bone to pick. “Advancement”? You describe changes, but nowhere do I see evidence in your post to support the notion of “advancement”? You seem to be celebrating change for its own sake and then equating that with progress.

Admittedly, I’m coming at this from a different intellectual tradition, history, where we try to avoid teleological thinking.

This is a very relevant blog. I, too, have been asking myself the same question, i.e., how to connect with people who think and write similarly and who are exploring the same topics and iterests as I. Is there a good search method out there that allows people of similar interests to proactively share their ideas in a good forum? Thx. Bri

After the recent shooting at Virginia Tech, a student said that the warning sent by email from administration to all students wasn’t read quickly. He said they should have podcast the warning, or perhaps he said texted the warning. The point was that people responsible for student safety had not kept up with current means of communication.

One of the major social network sites reportedly was the main way students tried to find out who was safe and who was not. They exchanged information and comforted each other. Sure sounds like community to me.