Who Will See My Comment? [en]

Another interesting observation following my return to Facebook: when somebody responds to one of my posts there, it definitely feels like the audience for this response is primarily the people I am connected to. What I mean by that is that I expect that my contacts have a chance of seeing that response, because responses are closely tied to the original content (“comments and post“ format).

On Bluesky or Mastodon (or Twitter for that matter, and it could partly explain why I drifted away at some point and started spending more time on Facebook), when somebody responds to one of my updates, I do not expect the people connected to me to see it. And indeed, if they are not following the person who responded, if they do not specifically open up my update to see if there are responses or if it is part of the thread, they will not see it. On those platforms, responses are much more “their own thing” than on Facebook or on a blog.

On Facebook, there is an immediate and visible feeling of micro-community around a publication, when people start commenting. It feels like we’ve just stepped into a break-out room. Participants get notifications, and come back to see responses. If the conversation becomes lively, it is made visible to more people. People will end up connecting to each other after having “met” repeatedly in a common friend’s facebook comments.

Bluesky, Mastodon and Twitter (yeah, and Threads) feel more fragmented. It’s more difficult to follow for lots of people. They are faced with bits and pieces of conversations flying about, and access to the context of those is not frictionless. Part of this, I think, has to do with how publication audience is managed (I’ll definitely have to do a “part 4” about this in my Rebooting the Blogosphere series). And another, of course, is the primacy of non-reciprocal connections on those platforms.

What Facebook also does that blogs do not at this stage, is that Facebook makes my comments on other people’s publications candidates for appearing in the news feeds of people who are connected to me. Every now and again, something of the form “Friend has commented on Stranger’s post” will show up. The equivalent in the blogging world would be having a “reading tool” (now RSS readers, but we need to go beyond that, that’s the Rebooting the Blogosphere part 3 post that I’m actively not writing these days) which will not only show me the blog posts that the people I’m following have written, but also that they have commented here or there, on another blog. This tightens the connection between people and contributes to discovery – ie, finding new people or publications to follow.

In summary: there is something fundamentally different in how Facebook, the other socials, and blogs make visible to a person’s network the comments/responses they have made elsewhere. And the “feeling of conversation/community” of multi-person exchanges also varies from one platform to another.

Where Have All The Bloggers Gone? [en]

What is happening for me right now is interesting. During my Facebook exile, I reconnected with the social networks that I had been present on in a very passive manner these last years. I also wrote more on my blog (here!), and made an effort to get back into reading other blogs, even though I have never been a really huge blog reader in my past. I installed an RSS reader, and started subscribing, process which is now pretty frictionless. To my surprise, there are lots of blogs! Lots of people still blogging! Lots of people who took up blogging way after the Golden Era of Blogs! I see them show up here and there on Mastodon and Bluesky, and of course, in blog posts.

In the few days since I’ve been back on Facebook, I have been struck by the pretty much total absence of blogs in my newsfeed over there. And when I think about how little visibility my Facebook updates pointing to my blog posts get, unless I jump through hoops like posting a screenshot, writing some text, putting the link in the first comment (talk about friction!), I realise that it is not so much because of blogs or bloggers, but because of how Facebook treats outgoing links, and how the algorithm prioritises things.

It reduces the visibility of blogs, therefore inciting people to post directly on the platform rather than on their blog (definitely what happened to me) or go elsewhere to share their blog links and abandon Facebook (what others have done).

Another thing that blogging more these days has made me realise is that, as I mentioned previously, I do not like blogging on my phone. Even though the WordPress app is nice and everything, the length and nature of the blog post is something which, to me, lends itself much more to being typed out on a keyboard in front of a decent screen. But since I went through the exercise of writing a blog post on my phone the other day, I have done it again. In particular, I have written drafts, started blog posts which I then finished on my computer. And at one point in that process, as my thumbs were tiring, I switched to dictation. And that is the key. Dictating on the phone.

Dictation is not perfect. But it is something I know how to do. Over 20 years ago, I spent nearly a whole year without touching a keyboard. During that year, I not only blogged and participated in online life, but I wrote my dissertation, worked in a telecom company, and sat for my final university exams. Dictation on my phone today does not allow me to “speak corrections” in the text I am writing, but it does now allow seamless transitions between dictation and keyboard, and the recognition quality is pretty good.

One of the things that happened during the Rise of The Socials is that our online activities became more and more “phone first”. And for me at least, blogging being primarily a “desktop computer” activity, and the socials being extremely well calibrated to mobile phone use, that definitely encouraged my drift away from blogging and into the socials.

So, clearly, for me, starting blog posts on my phone, even if I finalise them on the computer, and using dictation to write stuff down is definitely a way to remove friction from blogging, by bringing it to my phone, and providing it some of the immediacy of the facebook post.

Previously, I would spend my time having ideas like “oh, I need to blog about this!” but it was never the right moment to sit down at the computer and spend an hour or two typing it out. Not because I am a slow typer – on the contrary – but because I am not exactly concise, and I like putting links in my blog posts, so I often go down rabbit-holes looking for the right link for this or that.

Now, as I did this morning, I open up my WordPress app, and start dictating a blog post into it. Right now, I am pacing back-and-forth in my apartment and dictating this, instead of preparing my breakfast, but that is another story. At least I am capturing my idea. It will be 90% written and ready by the time I put down my phone, and all I will have to do on the computer a little bit later is make a bunch of corrections (I am“dirty dictating” without correcting much so that I can go fast), add links and a photograph (because I like photographs, and the WordPress app has made it super easy to add them to my posts from my phone), and publish it.

So, the bloggers are there. But if you live on Facebook, you might just not be seeing them.

Rebooting The Blogosphere (Part 2: Interaction) [en]

Start with part 1!

Yesterday I started writing “a blog post” to capture my coalescing thoughts about the open web and how to remove friction from blogging. Not all of it: some friction is good. But enough that people like me don’t get so easily drawn away from their blogs by “The Socials”.

So far, in Rebooting The Blogosphere (Part 1: Activities) I have distinguished four types of “activities” we carry out in online social spaces:

  • reading
  • commenting/reacting
  • writing
  • sharing.

Today, I’ll focus less on the actions an individual carries out, and more on the interaction between individuals. The wonderful thing about blogs is that they lowered the barrier to personal expression online, which in turn makes dialogue possible. But dialogue can take many forms.

Some thoughts on Dave’s “new model for blog discourse

Before I go any further, I would like to address a few points Dave brings up in his podcast from yesterday, because I actually started yesterday’s post with the intention of responding to it (amongst other things), but he put it up while I was already writing.

I love what Dave describes doing in the very early days, if I understood it right: write something, send it by e-mail to handful of people, and have a first round of discussion with that smallish group before publishing, and including value-adding responses to the publication. All this, scripted so that it was as frictionless as possible for him. This reminds me of Bruno Giussani‘s “Promote Comments Plugin” idea. It also fits with the idea I insisted upon yesterday that there is an added value to making the discussion about something available in the same place as that thing.

It is also reminding me of one aspect that I hadn’t thought about covering in this post-become-series: managing who the audience is. I firmly believe that allowing conversations to take place in closed or semi-public spaces is vital (cf. context collapse) – proof the number of people who take part in closed groups on Facebook or who share updates to “friends only“. I might have to make this a fourth part…

Dave describes a future tool in which comments (responses) get posted to the commenter’s blog and sent privately to the author of the original blog post, who can then decide whether to make it visible or not. For me, the second part of this process is already widely implemented in blogging tools, and has been for over a decade: its upfront comment moderation. Some people activate it, some don’t. On this blog, for example, if you’re a first-time commenter, your comment is not published. It is sent to me and I decide whether it’s worth publishing or not.

The first part is more interesting. It addresses the “ownership” issue of the comment, as tools like coComment or Disqus have tried to by providing a place all a person’s comments are collected. But it goes one step further and says: that place is the commenter’s blog. This is great and has been long needed. It would be interesting examine why previous attempts to do this across platforms have not stuck.

And this leads us to the topic of today: show my comments on my blog, but in what way? My comments are not the same kind of content as my posts. I don’t want my posts to be mixed up with my comments, everything on the same level. I’ll explain why.

Finally, Dave identifies some of the challenges with blog comments that I covered in yesterday’s post, but I’m not sure the current situation is as “broken” as he thinks. All that is missing, really, is a way to collect-own-display the comments I make all over the place in a space that is mine. Moderate comments upfront, or not? Or even, not have comments? That’s already possible, and up to the blogger. And yes, moderating comments or limiting who can comment directly cuts down tremendously on the spam and other bad behaviour issue.

Comments are about interaction – so are links between blogs. And as I mentioned yesterday, one thing the socials are really great at is interaction. You can spend your whole day on there (don’t I know it) interacting.

A way to look at interactions

I’m going to start by sticking with 1-1 interactions, to make it simpler, but I think this can be applied to interactions with more actors.

I think we all agree that exchanging letters with somebody (which I’m old enough to have done in my youth) is very different from talking on an instant messaging system. The key dimension that varies here is how (a)synchronous the interaction is. This drives a lot of the features we have in our social tools, and what makes them different from one another – just like in martial arts, the distance between the practitioners constrains the kind of techniques, and therefor the kind of fighting (interaction) that can take place.

I’d like to summarise it this way:

The length of contributions in an interaction is inversely proportional to how synchronous, or how conversational it is. And vice-versa.

Let’s unpack this a bit.

When Twitter showed up with its 140-character limit (which didn’t come out of nowhere, it was SMS-based), and constrained how much we could write in one go, it quickly became a place where we were “talking” more than “writing”, as we had been doing on our blogs. It was not quite as immediate as instant messaging, but somewhere in between. Like text messages.

In the early days of Facebook, if my memory serves me right, there was a distinction between sending a message to somebody (sorry, I can’t remember the terminology that was used, I’m not even 100% sure I’m remembering right) as some kind of internal mail, and chatting (or maybe they transformed the former into the latter and it changed the way we used it). In Discourse, you have both: you can send a message to somebody, or chat. Like you can e-mail somebody, or instant message them.

And I suspect I am not the only person to feel some degree of annoyance when I receive an “instant message” that should have been “an e-mail”, because it requires me to sit down, absorb a “speech”, and then figure out how on earth I’m going to respond to all that was said in one go, particularly now the person who sent it is not online anymore, because I had to wait until I had enough time to properly read it, digest it, and figure out my response.

Instant messaging works when it’s used for short things that you can take in at a glance (or barely more) and answer without having to think too much. It is conversation, with an asynchronous twist. When both parties are connected and interacting (synchronous), it is very close to in-person (or “on the phone”) synchronous conversation, but with this “optional asynchronicity”, as there is a blind spot regarding the context of the other party, and how it impacts their availability to read or respond right now, or even, to keep the conversation going. (If you’re on the phone with them or in the same room: they are available.)

When in “conversation mode”, contributions can become a bit longer, but not too long: if you throw a 3-page essay at somebody in an instant message or chat conversation, chances are you’ll lose them. Just like in-person conversation: if you monologue for 10 minutes at the person you’re talking with, you don’t have a conversation anymore. And actually, this pretty much never happens: there are non-verbal cues that the person opposite you is going to give that will either interrupt your monologue, or reveal that it is in fact a dialogue, when taking into account non-verbal contributions of the listener. But when you’re typing in an instant-messaging box, there is none of that.

Back to blogs. A blog post does not have the same conversational qualities as a response to a tweet. Blogs live in a more asynchronous interaction space than the socials or chatting. Comments are generally more conversational than blog posts. But probably less than updates on the socials.

“Allowed length” of contribution plays a role in shaping the kind of interaction, as well as design. If you’re typing in a tiny box, you’re less likely to write an e-mail or a blog post. If you’re typing in a box that uses up the whole screen, you’re less likely to write only one sentence.

Why did so much conversation move from blogs and chats to socials? I think that it is because they are in some sweet space on the (a)synchronicity continuum. They allow belated responses, but also real-time interaction. Notifications are key here, as is the fact that writing/responding are pretty much the same thing (same on Twitter or Bluesky or Mastodon, not-quite-same on Facebook, but close enough) and in the same space as reading/listening. It’s super easy to jump in and out of conversation. Frictionless.

So, it’s not just about reducing friction around reading blogs, writing blog posts, and commenting on them: it’s also about how we integrate the blogosphere and the socialsphere. One cannot and should not replace the other. There will always be people who like writing stuff. And others who are just happy to interact or react. And it doesn’t make sense to corral them into separate spaces.

Does anybody remember Backtype? I didn’t. Well, I do now after reading my blog post. The idea was to find a way to bring “back to the blog post” conversation about it that was happening on the socials (gosh, I really hope it’s not too annoying for you all that I’ve started saying “the socials”, it’s just really practical; my apologies if it grates on you). What about Diigo comments?

There is a common theme here: somebody writes a blog post. There is discussion about it or prompted by it – in the comments, on other blogs, on Bluesky, Facebook, Twitter and Mastodon, even Threads. How do we give easy access to these fragmented conversations (I think conversation fragmentation is now something that we have accepted as inevitable and normal) to those who are reading the post? And how do we do that in a way that a) leaves some control in the blogger’s hands over what to show and not to show (less spam) and b) allow people participating in the conversation to keep ownership of their content, in the sense that even if it can be made invisible in a given context (e.g. on the blog post), it cannot be outright removed by a third party, and remains “on the record” of the person who wrote it?

Who owns the conversation?

There is a lot of talk about retaining rights or ownership to one’s content. But who owns a conversation? Or beyond that, a community? The whole is more than the sum of the parts. When people come together to create something together (including relationships), who owns that? I mentioned previously that when facebook allows you to “download your content”, that doesn’t seem to include comments (wait, I have a doubt now – I think the export used to, but not anymore, correct me if I’m wrong, as I can’t go and check easily). Or comments by others made on your posts. In any case, say you can download your comments: a lot of them are contributions to conversations, and make little or no sense without their context – the publication the conversation took place about, other people’s comments.

I think there needs to be some kind of “collective ownership” understanding, which is more nuanced than “I wrote it, I have power of life or death over it”. When does something you offer up to the collective cease to be completely yours? In my opinion, it remains yours in the sense that it cannot be taken away from you against your will. Corollary: if contributions to a conversation or a community also “belong” to the conversation or community, then it should not be possible to take it away from them unilaterally. This is something that needs to be thought out further: does it mean that I should not be allowed to remove my blog from the web?

What is clear at this point: we need to think beyond “atomic” contributions and also think about how our tools manage the collective creations that are conversations and communities.

So, let’s sum up today: interaction is not a monolith. Online conversations occur at varying speeds and are made up of contributions of varying nature. Reclaiming and rebooting the blogosphere and the open web needs to take that into account and embrace it, and figure out how to bring it together in an open way, with frameworks, standards, protocols or the like, not yet another “One Platform to Replace Them All”.

That will be tomorrow, in part 3.

Thanks for reading, and don’t hesitate to react: on the socials, here in the comments, or on your blog!

Rebooting The Blogosphere (Part 1: Activities) [en]

Some thoughts (part 1 of 3) following exchanges on Bluesky with Dave, amongst others. My Facebook exile is clearly bringing to a boil my preoccupation with our reliance on big capitalist platforms for our online presence and social life. Though I never “stopped blogging”, I clearly poured a lot more energy over the last decade into what I now think of as “The Socials” (Twitter, Facebook, Bluesky, Mastodon and the like).

Why? How did that happen? What makes it so much more “easier” to hang out over there than to write here? Dave rightly points out to “1-click subscribe” as a killer feature that Twitter brought to the table (written summary of the podcast if you don’t want to dive into listening). But there is more than that.

I am pondering a lot on what I am “missing”, having lost facebook. On what is “difficult” about blogging, in comparison. Where is the friction?

Very clearly, one thing that The Socials (I’ll drop the uppercase soon) do very well is:

  1. bring everything (reading, writing, responding) together in one seamless interface/site/app
  2. shift interaction closer to real-time and what we perceive as “conversation”.

The rest of this blog post covers the first point. A second one will cover the second one. And finally, in a third post I’ll try and put together a proposal for how we can use our understanding of how the socials manage “so well” to remove friction from blogging and help reboot the blogosphere.

As I was writing this post I poked around in my archives to link to where I’d spoken about some aspects of the topic, so here are a some of those I dug up, in addition to those linked in the text itself (realising I wrote so much about this stuff it makes my head hurt):

I see three main “activities” for taking part in the text-based social web, and a fourth that may be worth distinguishing from the third:

  1. Reading or consuming: basically, taking in things that others have put there.
  2. Responding, commenting, reacting: expressing oneself based on something somebody else has provided.
  3. Writing: making available to others ideas, stories, in a broad sense, our creations.
  4. Sharing or boosting: highlighting for our network/readership things that are not by us.

Some comments regarding this typology (bear with me, it will come together in the end).

Reading

RSS does a good job of allowing us to collect things to read from different sources into one place. Many different tools make RSS feeds available. Many different tools read/collect/organise RSS feeds. However, they usually keep this collection of feeds private.

As Dave says, subscribing to an RSS feed generally requires too many steps. Too much friction. The socials make it 1-click (sometimes two) to follow or friend (connect to) somebody. And it’s right there in front of you, a button that calls you to do it. Inside blogging platforms like WordPress.com or Tumblr, you have some kind of 1-click subscription, but it keeps you in their internal reader (just like the socials do, by the way).

Commenting

Responding/commenting is a can of worms, in my opinion. When I started blogging, blogs had no comments. We responded to each other’s publications by writing on our own blogs and linking to what we were responding or reacting to. I actually wrote about this a couple of days back.

After a few months of blogging, I added comments to my blog, so one could say it’s pretty much always had them. (For the nostalgic: the blogger discuss thread I got my comments from, and the page on my site which for some time provided the PHP comment script to hungry bloggers.) And most blogs have them too, though far from all.

Comments come with issues, as well as opening new doors:

  • first of all, you’re leaving your stuff in a space that somebody else controls (ring any bells?) – when the “host blogger” deletes their blog or their post, there goes your comment
  • second, the way comments are designed invite shorter contributions or reactions – this makes the exchange more conversational and less epistolary, tightening the relationship between the different parts of the exchange provided by different people and quickening the pace
  • comments link back to the commenter’s blog, therefore creating an incentive to comment for visibility and not just for what one has to say
  • the visibility incentive leads to people commenting while adding little value (in the best cases) and outright spam (in the worst, widespread case)
  • the lack of a frictionless system to be informed of responses to comments (think “response notifications” on the socials) leads to interrupted interactions (I liked the term “drive-by commenting“)
  • the widespread presence of comments on blogs raises the bar for what is perceived as “deserving” to be a blog post, possibly contributing to the idea that writing a blog post is a “big thing” that you might need to make time for (or that might suck up half your day), in comparison with just “leaving a quick comment” after reading something
  • the visibility of comments led to it becoming a measure of blogging success, increasing a kind of competitiveness in the space, and, in some cases, even its commercialisation.

I see comments as solving two main problems:

  1. attaching the “discussion” about a publication to that publication: all in one place, instead of spread out in blog posts you might not even know exist
  2. lowering the barrier to entry for participating in said discussion: you don’t need any sort of account to comment.

Over the years, many tools have attempted, in some way, to “fix” the problems that come with comments. A few examples:

  • coComment: solve the “notification” issue by tracking comments made over different blogs – and somewhat, the “ownership” issue, by giving the commenter a central repository of their comments
  • Disqus: solves notifications and central repository (but limited to Disqus-enabled sites) and maybe spam, to some extent
  • Akismet and all the other spam-fighting systems…

In a world without comments, people who read a post will not necessarily know there is a “response” somewhere else out there in the blogosphere. The blog author might see it if the person responding tells them (some way or another), or if they check their referrers (didn’t we all use to do that). But the reader cannot know, unless the blog post author knows, and links to the response. Trackback and Pingback came in to solve this issue, creating a kind of automated comment on the destination post when somebody linked to it (with all the spam and abuse issues one can imagine).

Tags and Technorati also played a role in “assembling” blog posts around a specific topic, which could be seen as some kind of loose conversation.

But it’s not the same thing as having the different contributions to a conversation one below the other on the screen at the same time.

Writing

This one is simple. There are many good tools (many open-source) to write blog posts. You can create an account somewhere and get started, or install software on a server somewhere – with a hosting company or in your basement. They work on mobile, in the desktop browser, or even in apps. There are generally ways to export your content and move to another tool if you want. Some are full of bells and whistles, others are pared down.

Blogging has no character limit – the socials do. This, implicitly, encourages writing different things. Design also does that: is the box I’m writing in something that takes up the whole page (like the one I’m typing this blog post in) or is it a little box that might expand a bit but not that much, like on Facebook (which also doesn’t have character limits)?

I think this is a crucial aspect which should not be ignored. The blog posts I wrote in 2000-2001 are, for many of them, things that would be updates on the socials today. They are not the same as blog posts, and we need to keep that. The way we interact with “updates” or “blog posts” is also different (I’ll come to that below if you’re still reading by then). They generate a different kind of interaction. And sometimes, we start writing an update (or even a comment/reply) and it transforms into something that could be a blog post. How do we accommodate for that?

Sharing

Sharing is trickier, and this is why I’ve separated from writing. If writing can be thinking out loud or telling a story I have in my head, sharing is “I saw something and you should see it too”. Maybe I want to add an explanation to why I’m sharing it, or “comment” (hah!), but maybe I just want to put it out there, nearly like a shared bookmark. Of course, if what I write about what I’m sharing starts taking up a lot of space, I’m probably going to be writing a blog post with a link in it. And if I’m just sharing a link to something, I might as well be using some kind of public bookmarking tool (remember delicious?)

Bringing it all together

This is what I said the socials were great at. When I’m on Facebook, I am on my news feed (reading). I can 1-click-share and 1-click-comment on what I see, in addition to 1-click-subscribe if something new I want to track crosses my radar. If I want to write something, the box to do so is in the same view as my news feed – or pretty much any “reading” page I’ll be looking at (a group, for example; groups are another thing to talk about, but that’ll be another post).

I don’t really have to determine if I want to read, write, share, comment – I go to the same place. Whatever I want to do, the tool and environment remains the same. Tumblr does that well too.

Whereas look at blogging:

  • I want to write a post, I go to my blogging software
  • I want to read stuff, I open my RSS reader (confession: I’ve never been good at this) or conjure up a blog URL from somewhere (memory? bookmark? blogroll? link in another post?)
  • I’m done reading something (in my RSS reader) and want to comment: I need to click over to the blog itself to do that – or wait, do I want to comment, or write a whole blog post? I have no clue how much I’m going to want to write once I get going, I just know I have something to say.
  • I read a great blog post (or other thing online, for that matter) and want to share it, I need to pick up the link and write a blog post. Or maybe, instead, I just stick the link in a toot on Mastodon? There are “blog this” bookmarklets, but what about if I’m on my phone?
  • Yeah, I could post my “statusy updates” to my blog like it’s summer 2000, but do my blog subscribers really want to see “spent a lot of time feeding the sick old cat” in their RSS reader?

Think about community platforms like Discourse: want to post, want to respond, want to read? All in the same “place”. You get notifications, you can configure them. I think there is a lot to learn from this type of platform and the socials to bring “blogging stuff” together.

And before somebody says: “your blog should replace your socials” or “you should just blog on mastodon”, wait for the post I plan on writing tomorrow about what I see as a very important distinction in between these two types of online “social” spaces: exchange intensity and pace.

Ideas like making WordPress and Mastodon work together and FeedLand (in short, it makes your RSS subscriptions visible on your blog; check the new shiny blogroll in my sidebar, thanks for the shoutout, Dave!) are absolutely on the right track, but if we treat all “conversation” and all “publication” the same, we will fail in building an open, independent social web that is integrated and frictionless enough to be a realistic alternative to the facebooks of this world for more than just us few geeks.

Continue reading with part 2!

Blogging On My Phone (Facebook Suspension Day 17) [en]

The post « Blogs don’t have to be so lonely » (via Dave) has had me thinking, in between two feedings for my poor old Oscar. Manuel’s blog doesn’t have comments. Just like this one in its early days, and pretty much all blogs at the time.

We linked to each other.

Comments changed that: it became less about linking to others, more about leaving your link on other people’s blogs.

Less invitations for your neighbours to join you, more peeing on the bushes in their garden.

Comments aren’t all bad of course. It’s great to have a space for discussion that is strongly connected to the post that sparked it. But they can be subverted and it can go overboard.

When it comes all about the comments, we end up with Facebook, Twitter (RIP), Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads and the like.

This is a shortcut and it’s debatable. What I’m getting at is the respective importances of « writing » versus « discussing » on various platforms/tools. Just like with martial arts (bear with me), the distance between the protagonists determines the style.

How immediate and interactional are our online spaces? And how do those characteristics make us more or less likely to default to using a given medium or platform, or drift away?

One thing that is very clear to me is that I use « the socials » on my phone a lot, but I never blog from my phone. I’m doing it now, to try to understand this better — but that really never happens. I’ll write comments on my phone, I’ll write blogpost-length entries on LinkedIn or Facebook (well, before I was disappeared) that should have been blog posts, but when I think of something to write here, I want my keyboard and the digital environment my computer provides.

Because it’s more « I have something to write » and less « oh, I have something to tell you or share with you ».

On the socials, it’s a quick passing something in my mind that I want to catch and make available to whoever is around right now. On my blog, it’s something that I feel deserves a longer shelf-life. But I think that distinction in my gut is a bit of a fallacy: otherwise I wouldn’t be so broken up about losing 18 years of « stuff » on Facebook.

What I’ve wanted for a long time is the easiness and immediacy of « social sharing » with a way to « transform » some or all of it into blog posts, or blog post material. Something parallel to what I’ve done with my voice memos (I need to blog about this) which allows me to capture snippets of passing thoughts throughout the day in a frictionless manner, and then nearly automatically merge all those tiny audio files into one, that gets transcribed and digested.

I would like Openvibe (or whatever client I happen to be using, ideally seamlessly synced between phone and desktop, like the « Facebook experience » was) to allow me to mark posts (by me or others) as « for the blog » in some way, and also « switch to blogging » if I realise mid-writing that « this should be a post (too) ».

So, how was writing this on my phone? Not that bad. Is it just a question of habit? The small size of the screen, which means I do not have a « zoomed out » view of what I’ve written, bothers me. Adding links is OK (now I’ve realised I can just « paste » the link on selected text) but it seems to sometimes shift the link one character to the right (super annoying). Writing… well, it’s writing in a phone. My thumbs complain. It’s slower. I need to correct more mistakes than when I’m typing.

So, maybe it’s not so much that Openvibe or whatever social client should accommodate my blog, but that my blogging client should allow me to follow my socials and post to them. And why not, subscribe to my RSS feeds. (Now I’m wondering if I’m going to look very silly because it already does this 😅.)

Time to continue feeding the cat!

Les commentaires qui se transforment en article [en]

Je me souviens très bien d’avoir eu conscience, quand Twitter et Facebook ont commencé à prendre de plus en plus de place dans la vie en ligne des gens et dans la mienne, de l’impact que ça a eu sur les blogs, et surtout les commentaires. Notre énergie rédactionnelle et interactionnelle s’est trouvée happée par les plateformes, et nos blogs en ont fait les frais.

Laissant de côté la traumatisme de la suspension de mon compte facebook et de la perte probable de près de deux décennies de données, c’est clair que cette semaine sans facebook (on y est là, à l’heure près!) a donné un grand coup d’accélérateur à un mouvement intérieur qui prenait de l’ampleur: tenter de revenir au web ouvert et indépendant, humain et authentique, qui m’est cher depuis plus de 25 ans. Donc j’écris sur mon blog, parce qu’au moins ici je suis chez moi et c’est moi qui ai les clés et le titre de propriété, je réapparais sur d’autres plates-formes, je réfléchis à l’avenir de ma présence en ligne.

Toutes ces dernières années, je suis toujours surprise quand j’écris ici que je réalise qu’il y a des gens qui me lisent encore. Merci d’être là. Et des fois, il y a des gens qui commentent. Comme Olivier. Olivier qui a un blog, et qui comme tant d’entre nous, se dit “j’aimerais y écrire plus“. Du coup, je suis allée y faire un tour. J’ai lu quelques articles, et répondu. Laissé un commentaire. Vous savez qu’au début, il n’y avait pas de commentaires sur les blogs? Ni sur celui-ci. C’est dur à croire parce que ça fait tellement partie de notre “définition” du blog, les commentaires – mais en fait, au début, il n’y en avait pas. Quand on avait quelque chose à répondre, on faisait un lien vers le billet original, et on écrivait ce qu’on avait à dire sur notre blog. L’interaction était moins immédiate, moins publique. Mais ce qu’on écrivait restait chez nous.

La première étape, ça a été les fils de commentaires sous les articles de blog. Avec un effet collatéral: le blogueur qui vire sa publi et tous les commentaires avec. Plus ou moins de grogne. Il y a du des outils comme coComment et Disqus (qui est toujours en place, sur Blogger par exemple). Mais surtout, il y a eu la deuxième étape, les réseaux – Twitter, Facebook, mais il y en a d’autres qui ont déjà passé de vie à trépas – qui ont vu une accélération de l’interaction et des échanges, toujours plus sur la place publique, toujours plus éloignés du contenu dont on parle, et toujours moins entre nos mains. Les milliers d’échanges que j’ai eus sur Facebook au sujet de tel ou tel article, telle ou telle publication, qu’elle soit quelque part sur le web ou postée directement sur la plateforme, maintenant expédiés vers le néant par les robots en charge de la plateforme, en témoignent.

En mémoire du “bon vieux temps” du début des blogs, je vais reproduire ci-dessous ce que j’ai écrit dans les commentaires d’Olivier, avec lien vers ses articles originaux. Peut-être que ça vous donnera envie d’arrêter de scroller quelques secondes (c’est pas un jugement, je sais combien c’est conçu pour qu’on le fasse “malgré nous”) pour les lire.

Top IMDb : 2 ans plus tard

Bon, j’arrive tard à la fête, mais j’y suis! Ça fait longtemps que je ne regarde presque plus de films, après m’être fait un orgie Marvel à un moment ces dernières années. Pas parce que je n’ai pas envie, mais parce que je croule sous la pile énorme des choses à faire et des envies à poursuivre, et bloquer du temps pour me poser devant un film (même une série!) est compliqué pour moi. Pas par manque de volonté, mais disons par excès d’hyperactivité. Même depuis mon accident, alors que justement je devrais passer un peu plus de temps à glandouiller (c’est pas bien de passer la journée entière sur Netflix, mais s’envoyer un film ou une série de temps en temps, vu où j’en suis, ce serait pas mal).

Souvent, quand je me dis, ok je regarde un film, je ne sais pas lequel regarder. Parce que comme avec le reste, il y a un tel backlog de choses à voir que ça me paralyse. Je sais que j’ai raté tellement de bon films ces 15 dernières années. Comme avec la lecture, d’ailleurs, ma tendance naturelle c’est d’aller vers des genres “faciles et entertaining” pour moi: SF pour la lecture, Marvel et SF pour les films. Mais chaque fois que je lis ou regarde autre chose, ça me fait monstre plaisir. Le fameux décalage entre ce qu’on pense nous plaira, et ce qui nous plaira. Donc j’aime bien cette idée, prendre les top x et commencer par là. Je note 🙂

Grippe

Team vaccin ici aussi, depuis 2009 et la “Grippe A”! Je ne crois pas avoir eu la grippe adulte, par contre je suis une abonnée aux infections respiratoires. L’hiver 2023-2024 j’en ai enchaîné six entre début novembre et l’Ascension. J’ai quand même fini en consultation d’immunologie, rien de grave, suspicion de petite immunodéficience et terrain allergique (ça semble aller beaucoup mieux depuis que je suis sous anthistaminiques en continu, je n’ai d’ailleurs plus le nez qui coule en permanence, c’est magique!)

Ce fameux hiver, j’ai un syndrome post-viral après une des infections (qui n’était probablement pas le covid, le covid j’ai eu après, mais c’était peut-être aussi la première infection de novembre; bref). En effet, près de 3 semaines à me trainer. Je suis suffisamment souvent malade pour savoir comment ça va, chez moi, quels symptômes quel jour, comment ça évolue, combien de jours de travail je rate (car c’est systématique… tu me colles 37.1 de température je suis inutile). En gros, ça me bouffe une semaine, dix jours, puis je vais de nouveau bien, avec une toux qui traine encore et encore. 

Mais pas là. Là, au bout de dix jours, non seulement je toussais toujours, mais j’étais totalement à plat. Je me souviens être sortie me balader une vingtaine de minute dans le quartier, au pas de l’oie (instruction du médecin, faut mettre le nez dehors quand même un peu). Et je suis rentrée, je me suis posée sur le canapé, et j’ai dormi une heure. Jamais ça ne m’était arrivé, ce genre de chose. 

En bonne geek j’avais déjà quelques infos car j’avais suivi ce qu’on savait du covid long (j’y ai échappé jusqu’ici, mais c’était et ça reste ma hantise), et j’ai fouiné encore un peu, et eu confirmation: il ne faut pas se pousser, en cas de fatigue post-virale. Il faut respecter la fatigue et se donner du repos. Quand on se pousse, ça prend plus long, et c’est là que ça courte aussi un risque de se chroniciser. 

Ça va à contre-sens de mon fonctionnement, ça, de s’écouter et ne pas se pousser. Mais j’ai fait. (Et depuis mon accident j’ai encore pu bien mettre en pratique, et je continue – heureusement que j’ai eu l’entrainement de l’hiver d’avant pour apprendre les bases.) 

Et ce que j’ai trouvé incroyable, c’est que la “sortie” de cet état s’est faite extrêmement rapidement. Qu’on s’entende, l’état a duré, mais un jour, alors que je me trainouillais toujours de la même manière, j’étais en train de remonter les escaliers entre l’espace coworking et chez moi quand j’ai réalisé… que j’étais en train de retrouver ma vitesse habituelle. Et en l’espace de quelques heures, j’exagère pas, j’ai quasi retrouvé mon état normal. Ça m’a vraiment fait le même effet que lorsqu’en vélo électrique je suis par erreur en mode assistance “sport” (plus bas que d’habitude) et que je passe en “turbo” (le mode avec max d’assistance, habituel). 

Depuis, j’ai pu constater que dès que j’avais un peu de fièvre, je le sentais en fait très bien. Si monter les escaliers est un effort physique qui me coûte, c’est signe de quelque chose. Parce qu’en temps normal je monte ces escaliers rapidement, deux à deux souvent, comme une petite gazelle (même si je ne ressemble plus à une gazelle depuis longtemps).

Vous avez toujours votre blog? Manifestez-vous dans les commentaires – ou dans un billet!

Faut-il des titres? [en]

Il y a des années de ça, après un atelier d’écriture de 30 jours sur le thème du deuil, j’ai commencé à écrire des choses que je ne partage pas ici. Parfois beaucoup, parfois peu, souvent poétique. Des fois je m’épate, mais je sais bien que mon regard est celui du créateur émerveillé par sa créature, alors je me retiens prudemment. D’autant plus que quand j’écris, voilà, ça sort, je relis à peine, je retravaille encore moins. Une fois dehors ça m’intéresse beaucoup moins.

Alors ça vaut ce que ça vaut, probablement, mais parfois, secrètement au fond de moi, je me prends à rêver qu’il y a peut-être là-dedans des petites perles géniales. Vous savez, ce genre de rêve qui n’a pas le courage de se confronter à la réalité, ni vraiment de s’assumer, et qu’on classe au rayon des illusions un peu naïves, sans y croire tout à fait (à notre classement).

Parfois je partage quelque chose sur facebook, mais souvent pas. Je suis souvent étonnée des réactions, prudemment, mais ça me fait plaisir quand quelqu’un aime, bien sûr. Et ça vient nourrir le petit rêve que j’ai rangé sur l’étagère avec toutes les autres illusions.

Ces jours je me suis reprise à mettre en mots quelques couleurs de vie. Je suis allée relire des choses du passé, et comme souvent, je n’ai aucun souvenir d’avoir écrit ça, ou alors à peine, et surtout, j’ai l’impression de lire les mots d’une autre. (N’y voyez rien de mystique là-dedans, je vis dans un monde bien matérialiste. La complexité du fonctionnement de notre cerveau est suffisamment merveilleuse pour ne pas avoir besoin de plus.)

Je suis remontée un bout. Il y a plus de 70 pages dans ce document.
Clair, quand on écrit des choses en colonne, ça prend plus de place. Mais quand même.

Alors que je reprends pour la nième fois une relation un peu plus suivie avec mon blog, j’ai envie de mettre ici certaines de ces choses que j’ai écrites et écrirai. Pas forcément celles que je trouverais les meilleurs (sérieusement, j’en sais rien), juste celles qui me feront envie. Parce que voilà, c’est moi aussi, et si j’écris, c’est d’abord pour moi, parce que c’est bon pour moi de le faire, mais ce n’est pas que pour moi, c’est aussi pour rencontrer l’autre, participer de cette façon aux liens entre les êtres, ne pas vivre comme des îles. Contribuer à ma manière à cette aventure collective qu’est tenter de comprendre ce que c’est d’être en vie, d’être humain, d’exister, d’être dans le monde.

Et là, le truc qui me bloque: la plupart de ces petits écrits n’ont pas de titres. Et dans un blog, y’a des titres. Et franchement, j’ai pas toujours envie de rajouter un titre. Je numérote? Je mets la date? “Poème du 23 mai 2021”?

A quoi ça tient.

Blogging and Facebook [en]

[fr] Réflexion sur la place du blog, de facebook, et de la solitude.

Not 20 years ago. But not yesterday either.

My number of blogging years is going to start to look like 20. Well, 18 this summer, but that looks an awful lot like 20 around the corner. My old Quintus is not quite as old as this blog.

We all know that blogging before Twitter and Facebook was quite different from what it is now. “Social Media” made blogging seem tedious, and as we became addicted to more easily available social interaction, we forgot to stop and write. Some of us have been hanging in there. But most of those reading have left the room: consumption is so much easier in the click-baity world of Facebook.

Facebook didn’t invent click-bait. I remember the click-bait postings and the click-bait blogs, way back when. When the nunber of a comments on a post were an indicator of a blog’s success, and therefore quality, and therefore of the blogger’s worth. And then we lost Google Reader. Not that I was ever a huge user of any kind of newsreader, but many were. So Twitter and Facebook, our algorithm machines, became the sources to lead us to blog postings, and pretty much everything else we read.

As the current “delete Facebook” wave hits, I wonder if there will be any kind of rolling back, at any time, to a less algorithmic way to access information, and people. Algorithms came to help us deal with scale. I’ve long said that the advantage of communication and connection in the digital world is scale. But how much is too much?

Facebook is the nexus of my social life right now. But I’ve always viewed my blog as its backbone, even when I wasn’t blogging much. This blog is mine. I control it. It’s less busy than my facebook presence, to the point where I almost feel more comfortable posting certain things here, in a weird “private by obscurity” way, even though this is the open internet. But the hordes are not at the doors waiting to pounce, or give an opinion. Comments here are rare, and the bigger barrier to entry is definitely a feature.

I’ve found it much easier to write here since I decided to stop caring so much, stop putting so much energy in the “secondary” things like finding a catchy or adequately descriptive title (hey Google), picking the right categories, and tagging abundantly. All that is well and good, except when it detracts from writing. It makes wading through my posts more difficult, I’m aware of that. But oh well.

During my two-week holiday, I didn’t disconnect completely. That wasn’t the point. But I definitely pulled back from social interaction (online and off, it was a bit of a hermit fortnight). I spent more time alone, more time searching for boredom. I checked in on the little francophone diabetic cat group I manage, as well as FDMB, a little. I checked my notifications. I posted a little. But I didn’t spend that much time going through my feed.

And you know what? After a week or ten days or so, my facebook feed started giving me the same feeling as daytime TV. Or cinema ads. I stopped watching TV years ago. I watch the odd movie or series, but I’m not exposed to the everyday crap or ads anymore. And when I go to the cinema, the ads seem so stupid. I’m not “in there” anymore. This mild deconnection gave me a sense of distance with my facebook newsfeed that I was lacking.

I caught myself (and still catch myself) diving in now and again. Scroll, scroll, like, scroll, like, tap, scroll, like, comment, scroll, scroll, scroll. What exactly am I doing here, keeping my brain engaged when I could be doing nothing? Or something else? I think my holiday gave me enough of a taste of how much I need solitude and doing-nothingness that I now feel drawn to it.

I’m not leaving Facebook. But if it were to disappear, I’d survive. I’d regroup here, read more blogs, listen to more podcasts (hah!). It helps that I’m looking at my immediate and medium-term professional future as an employee. And that I’ve recently experienced that forum-based communities could be vibrant, and in some ways better than Facebook groups.

Aimer écrire [fr]

Ça m’est venu hier dans une discussion avec une collègue: j’aime écrire, mais comme moyen d’expression. J’aime mettre par écrit des choses qui sont dans ma tête. J’aime m’exprimer par écrit, “parler” par écrit, réfléchir par écrit.

La rédaction pure, prendre un contenu arbitraire et le mettre en forme par écrit, collecter des infos de différentes sources pour en faire quelque chose de digeste, en tant que tel, ce n’est pas ma tasse de thé.

C’est certainement pour cela que durant toute ma carrière j’ai relativement peu écrit “sur commande”. Même lors des mandats rédactionnels que j’ai eus, j’avais une motivation forte à communiquer la matière dont il était question. Et lorsque ce n’était pas le cas, la rédaction était pénible. Oh, je l’ai fait, et je le ferai sans doute encore, mais je n’aime pas particulièrement ça.

Gagner ma vie en écrivant, ça n’a jamais été un objectif pour moi. Gagner ma vie en réfléchissant, ou en communiquant mes idées, ça oui, c’est attractif.

Je blogue depuis plus de dix-sept ans. Il y a eu des pauses plus ou moins longues, la fréquence rédactionnelle a beaucoup varié, le genre d’écrits aussi. Ici, je pense et je parle à haut clavier. Et c’est pour ça que ça dure.

 

Rendre visibles ses articles de blog, c’est galère [fr]

[en] Yep, making your blog articles visible sucks -- so does making anything visible.

Bon, pis les blogs? “Galère pour rendre visibles ses articles de blog,” me dit-elle. Je crois que c’est comme pour tout. On est vraiment sur-sollicités. Tout le monde et toutes les marques sont sur Facebook. C’est la surenchère du “comment faire pour que les gens remarquent ce que je fais”. Parce que oui, faut faire bien, être pertinent, répondre à un besoin chez l’autre… mais s’il ne sait pas qu’on existe, tout ça, c’est inutile!

Je ne dis rien de nouveau. C’est pour ça qu’on a la pub. On est tous dans une grande foule à tenter de se faire entendre. Ou voir. Le premier qui monte sur la table ou les épaules de quelqu’un, on va le voir. Mais si tout le monde le fait, on ne voit plus personne.

La solution? Perso, je pense qu’on va “en revenir” un peu, de cette surenchère à capter l’attention de tous. Quand tout le monde vous crie dans les oreilles, celui qui vous donne un petit billet réussira à se faire entendre. C’est ce qu’on disait au début du web, ce que disait le Cluetrain: on est pas des “eyeballs”, on est pas des nombres, on en marre qu’on nous objectifie pour nous vendre des trucs.

Et j’ai l’impression, de plus en plus, qu’online est devenu ce qu’était avant offline. Exemple bête, les infos. J’ai arrêté de regarder les infos il y a des années parce que ça ne faisait que me rendre plus anxieuse. Maintenant les infos sont partout sur Facebook et Twitter. La pub aussi.

Alors, moi, je crois (et j’insiste sur “croire”, c’est une croyance) qu’on va finir par revenir au fondamental: aux gens, aux relations. Quand on est saturé d’infos, et qu’on réalise qu’on ne peut pas leur faire confiance (Fake News anybody?) on va finir par recommencer à demander à son voisin ce qu’il en pense.

Retour au personnel, au relationnel. (C’est de ça que j’ai causé mardi à Genève, d’ailleurs.)

Alors, le blog? Le blog reste (j’en suis persuadée) l’endroit par excellence pour une communication humaine un peu plus développée et moins réactive que les commentaires Facebook. La discussion c’est bien, et utile, et nécessaire, mais des fois c’est bien de réfléchir un peu plus tranquillement dans son coin.

Son problème, c’est la distribution, et c’est là qu’il est “comme tout le reste”. Faut avoir un réseau de malade sur Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, et ailleurs. Faut savoir présenter les choses de façon accrocheuse pour capter l’attention du facebookeur décérébré (je sais, j’en suis aussi), qu’il clique et qu’il lise (et ne se contente pas juste de partager, ou pire, d’ignorer). D’ailleurs, je mets maintenant des photos à mes articles, même si elles n’ont rien à voir. Sinon, ils n’existent même pas, dans l’écosystème de distribution Twitter-Facebook-Linkedin.

Le chat qui miaule bien fort obtient les croquettes…

Les lecteurs RSS sont quand même bien morts avec Google Reader.

Le revers (positif) de la médaille, c’est l’e-mail. Avec la démocratisation des outils sociaux, notre e-mail s’est quand même un peu vidé de toutes sortes d’activités qui fonctionnent mieux sur Facebook et consorts. Je ne sais pas vous, mais pour ma part, je ne croule pas sous les mails. Les humains ont appris à utiliser des filtres (pas tous, ok, mais quand même), Gmail a commencé à regrouper nos longs échanges en conversations, et les boîtes de réception sont de plus en plus intelligentes.

L’e-mail, qu’on a voulu mort il y a des années (je me souviens de quelques interviews, dont une, j’étais sur le quai de la gare de St-Prex, marrant comme ça marche la mémoire, bref, on essayait de me faire dire que l’e-mail c’était fini, non mais tu rêves), c’est un certain retour à ces messages de moi à toi, en privé, loin de tout le bruit et des sollicitations. C’est pas pour rien que les newsletters reprennent du poil de la bête.

Donc, assurez-vous qu’on puisse s’abonner à votre blog par e-mail. J’adore le blog de Sylvie. Mais si je n’étais pas abonnée par e-mail, je raterais beaucoup d’articles. L’e-mail, je sais que je le regarde. Au moins le titre. Les réseaux sociaux, c’est pas fait pour tout voir. C’est conçu pour faire remonter les voix les plus fortes, et ce sont elles qu’on finit par entendre. On y a beaucoup cru (je me mets dedans), mais ça a des effets vachement pervers, mine de rien.

Donc oui, rendre son blog visible, c’est la galère. Rendre n’importe quoi visible, en fait.

Il y a certainement des choses à redire concernant les idées que j’émets ici. J’ai écrit tout ça d’une humeur un peu “coup de gueule” qui reflète aussi où j’en suis par rapport à tout ça. Si vous avez des objections ou des avis différents, je serai ravie de les entendre.