Category: Thinking

Big ideas, thoughts, analysis on social media, the web, the internet.

Rebooting The Blogosphere (Part 3: Integration) [en]

Start with part 1 (activities), then part 2 (interaction). Sorry this 3rd part took a little longer than intended to come out.

In parts 1 and 2 of this series, I covered some types of activities (reading, writing, responding, sharing) that come into play in the text-driven social web, as well as the different flavours of interaction that make up our online relations (more or less synchronous, and related to that, contribution length in those exchanges).

What this is all about is figuring out how blogging can learn from what made “The Socials” (which became the big capitalist social networks we all know) so successful, to the point that many die-hard bloggers (myself included) got sucked up in the socials and either completely abandoned their blog, or left it on life-support. I believe that understanding this can help us draft a vision for how things in the “open social web” (I’ll keep calling it that for the time being) can work, now or in the near future, to give us the best of both blogging and the socials, without requiring that we sell our souls or leave our content hostage to big corporations.

So today is part 3, which I’ve called “Integration” (initially tried “Friction”, a key part of the story), which is about bringing all of this together.

Part 1 already kicks off this idea: what the socials do really well is remove friction, in particular by bringing in the same interface writing/posting, commenting, reading. They do it really well, but inside their walled garden. If we try and start with blogging as the centre, what would it look like? Let’s try.

Start with reading

First of all: reading and following. RSS works, and we still have RSS readers despite Google almost making the ecosystem go extinct when it killed Google Reader. What we need is two things:

  1. make it super easy to subscribe to a blog, wherever I stumble upon it – as easy as following somebody on the socials – and make it visible
  2. from my “reading interface” (ie, the RSS reader), make it super easy to comment, share, react or link to a publication and start writing something new

Frictionless subscribe is well on the way, as far as I can see: I recently installed NetNewsWire, and since then, I can “share” any site I have open in my browser to the app (on my computer or my phone) and it will look for the feed and add it to my subscription list. The desktop and phone apps sync through iCloud. That works for me. It’s easy enough. I see a blog I like, I click twice and confirm, we’re good.

FeedLand makes it super easy to subscribe inside its own ecosystem (just tick a checkbox next to a feed you see in somebody else’s subscriptions), and has a bookmarklet, but it’s not as seamless. For example, after using the bookmarklet, I’m not “back on the page I was reading”, I’m inside FeedLand. I’m sure this kind of thing can be fixed. This is just to illustrate the kind of thing we need: some integrated way, ideally through the “share” menu (assuming it also exists in non-mac environments?), to “stupid-subscribe” to an RSS feed.

What FeedLand does that is great is make the subscriptions public, just like the people I’m following or connected to on the socials are visible to others. I can even embed them in my blog to use as a blogroll.

So, let’s say the subscription problem is pretty much solved, or nearly so. The second one is much, much trickier, and I think it’s the key to everything. (At least, one of the keys.)

In my “reading interface”, be it NetNewsWire or my FeedLand river (the “newsfeed”), I’m seeing the blog posts I’ve subscribed to. Let’s assume for now that how they are displayed is a question of user/tool preference and something we know how to do. For example, do I want to see the posts “mailbox-style” (with headers that I click on to display the post), or “newsfeed-style” (like a facebook newsfeed, with more or less long excerpts)?

Add reacting

Let’s concentrate on the next step: reacting, commenting, sharing. Can I do that easily? The screenshots above show that there is some intention in the right direction, but not enough. The desktop app gives me a share icon. FeedLand allows me to reshare inside FeedLand. I can star/like, but it remains local to the “reader software”.

This is where we need more. When I read a post I’m subscribed to, it should be trivial to:

  • “like” it, if the tool producing the post supports it
  • “comment” upon it, if the tool producing the post supports it
  • “share” to a tool of my choice, be it the socials, a bookmarking service, or my blog – with or without extra content on my part (I could write a whole blog post with a reference to the link in it, or I could just post the naked link to Bluesky if I wanted to)

While we are at it, I should also be able to see if there are comments visible to me, as well as likes/shares.

All this should be possible without leaving the reading interface.

Of course, this requires a slight mindset change for us bloggers: it shouldn’t matter so much if people read our post on our website or through the feed. In that respect, the feed should contain a complete version of the blog post: untruncated, with links and media. (I don’t know why I keep stumbling upon blog feeds with the links stripped out, by the way, it’s super annoying!)

So, I write a blog post with my blogging software of choice. This blog post can be liked, commented upon, or linked to (shared). I can choose whether likes and comments are active or not. This blog post is published to my blog, and in the RSS feed. In some cases, it also goes out by e-mail (not to be forgotten). Whether people read the blog post on the blog, in the feed reader, or in their e-mail, they can easily “interact” with it, where they are (less true with e-mail, so let’s leave it aside, but not forget it’s there). As the post author, I can of course choose to moderate comments before publication, so they are displayed with the blog post only if I choose to.

Maybe the feed reading software should also be capable of displaying existing comments if requested, to give context to the person wanting to comment. Or we could consider that this is where the integration ends, and where a visit to the blog post itself is in order. To be discussed, in my opinion.

There is really something about having to leave the reading space to interact with something you’re reading that is extremely problematic. Super users who juggle tabs and apps all day might not think it matters, but normal people who can’t tell their browser from the internet or a search engine will be lost. We need spaces where we can read-like-answer-share without being teleported to some strange new place without having wanted it.

Some practical considerations: let’s say we start implementing this. The technical details are beyond me, but I understand enough to know that not all blogs (or subscribable publications) will be “compatible” with the system from the get-go. No problem: grey out those interaction buttons that won’t work in the reader, and leave the link allowing the user to head out to the blog proper to comment or like. Sharing should always be possible, as each post has a permalink (at least we have that now).

Write where you read

This was for starters. Now for the first big idea: integration with the blogging software.

In other words: maybe all this “subscribing to things” should happen in the blogging tool – or the RSS reader needs to become a blogging client. Take your pick.

Here’s why. As I mentioned before, in the old, old days of blogging, blogs did not have comments. People linked to each other when they had something to respond. Some blogs, still today, do not have comments. And that is fine, it’s a personal choice. For me, the soul of the blogosphere is people reading each other and linking to each other. And we need tools that encourage that.

I think this is also something that can help fight against the “loneliness” some of us feel around blogging, compared to the busy experience of taking part in the socials. Think about this: on the socials, you’re writing your tweet, facebook post, toot, update or whatever on a page (whether on the web interface or in an app) that is filled with stuff your contacts have published. You are producing content that is going to go on and be part of this stream of updates. It feels like part of the newsfeed already. Even though everybody has a different newsfeed, it doesn’t feel like sending something out into the void. It feels like contributing to a collective space. And this is what blogging should feel like.

So my reading tool should allow for three things (at least), in that respect:

  1. create a blog post (mention or response) based on the one I’m reading, as already mentioned previously; bonus points if it makes it easy to quote part or parts of the post (think how easy forum software makes this)
  2. write a blog post from scratch, just like we normally do today in our blog admin interfaces (think “facebook post” here rather than “tumblr” for the vibe: a space a the top of your reading list that is there waiting for you to write a post, not nagging but inviting and tempting…)
  3. convert a comment you are writing on somebody else’s blog post into a blog post of your own, with a link to the original post – I’m pretty certain I’m not alone in regularly thinking “I just have a sentence or two to say” and lifting my nose up after having written 5 paragraphs; happens on the socials too, particularly facebook, as it doesn’t have any character limit (this is a nice way to make blog interlinking easier)

WordPress Reader is on the right track, although it feels a bit like a rough draft (I particularly don’t like the web interface – too much empty space and not enough content). It shows the newsfeed of the blogs I’ve subscribed to, and an inviting box at the top to “write a quick post”. How the editor expands and what features it offers in this context leaves room for improvement, but the idea is there. It’s also missing easy-peasy subscription outside the wordpress.com platform, as far as I can see, but let’s note that it allows the user to switch between mailbox and newsfeed views, has a share button (Facebook and X), a repost button (which unfortunately opens the editor in another window, but in a nice move presents the reposted blog post in card format – why not?), a like button (internal to WordPress), and in-reader commenting.

Right. So far we have:

  • a better “reader” experience, including frictionless subscription
  • a more integrated way of reacting to what we’re reading
  • reading and writing brought together in once place.

Bring in the socials

What is still missing (the second big idea) is how to tie this in with the socials. As I argued in part 2, interaction and conversation come in varying forms. Socials do not make blogging redundant, and neither does embracing blogging again make the socials redundant. Just as we still have a use for e-mail in the era of instant messaging, or phone calls in the era of voice messages.

We touched upon this issue earlier when mentioning that any post being read should be shareable to whatever platform we want. That’s pretty trivial and already somewhat possible (we have permalinks, remember, and on our phones at least, sharing to socials is always just a touch away). But that is not sufficient.

I see three key aspects in integrating the socials with the blogging experience I’ve been describing:

  1. Tying “comments/shares on the socials” to the relevant post (this is the neverending Trackback/Pingback/Backtype/Webmention story)
  2. Posting blog content to the socials (POSSE) or, more interestingly from my point of view, backfeeding from the socials to the blog (tools like Bridgy and TootPress are also in this space)
  3. Allowing the blogging/reading tool to function as a client for the socials.

The first one is an old story, but what it means is that what people are saying on the socials about what I wrote on my blog is part of the conversation related to what I wrote, and it might be desirable to have a way to point the readers of the blog post to it. It’s the argument for having comments on the blog. Or a list of Webmentions (if I’ve understood correctly that they are the Trackbacks of today). Or not. The conversation is there, and the blogger should have the ability to make it visible from the core content. Beneath a blog post, you could have comments (some made from inside an integrated tool for reading/reacting/writing, some made directly on the site), links to other blog posts which mention it, and links (or quotes? TBD) to public content on the socials about it. As I understand it, Bridgy does this.

The second one is three-pronged: I might want to share my blog posts on the socials when I publish, publish to the socials using my blog (with a separate post-type or category for example), or I might want to repost/archive on my blog whatever I have shared on the socials. The first two are outwards-going. The third is inward-coming, but instead of being centred on a piece of content (the blog post) like described above, and therefore on the content of what was published on the socials, it is centred on the person (the blogger), and therefore a specific account (or accounts).

I see two reasons for wanting to do this: first, for safekeeping (create an archive or mirror of whatever you post on Bluesky on your blog, for example) or for resharing to another audience, maybe in a slightly different form, whatever one posted elsewhere. I want to elaborate on the second case, which is in my opinion more interesting (obviously, because it’s a need I have).

I’ve already mentioned before that participating on the socials is very frictionless. The barrier is low. We are in conversation mode. It is “speaking” more than it is “writing”. Therefore, my hypothesis is that however much we love our blogs and everything, it’s still always going to be easier to quickly throw out a link on the socials, or jot down a thought, share a photo, respond to somebody and find ourselves coming up with an idea. To me, there is a lot of raw material there which might be worth preserving. Sure, if you’re having a back-and-forth about getting ready to go to the gym, maybe not, but if you’re sharing links or bite-sized thoughts or commentary on the world or whatever, that’s different.

It would make sense to be able to gather that daily production from the various socials one is active on, and organise it in what would be the “socials” equivalent of a post on a link blog. How exactly will be the topic of another post, because I think it requires going into lots of little details. But suffice to say, for now, that the idea would be to give the blogger an option to repatriate whatever has leaked from the bloggers brain to the socials in a form that could be either publishable as-is, or edited before publishing, or why not, broken down into more than one post if needed. “Today on the socials”, or something like that.

So, at this point we want to be able to create a two-way path between the blog and the socials, to push posts to the socials, bring back commentary or mentions to the blog posts, and the blogger’s updates to the socials.

We can go a small step further and integrate into our reader/blogging tool a client for the socials. We’re already reading RSS feeds, why not also read the social newsfeeds?

Openvibe is a client that combines different socials and allows the user to also subscribe to RSS feeds within the same interface. This would be the corollary. And if we’re reading, and we have the ability to write blog posts from there in addition to comments, why not also be able to publish to the socials? I like the way Openvibe manages cross-posting: you can choose where you want to cross-post each time; when you mention somebody, a little dialog open so that you can mention them on the different socials you’re posting to – or just enter text if they aren’t everywhere.

I could start composing something to share to the socials, and partway through decide it should be a blog post: I’d select the blog as a destination (this would be somewhat similar to converting a comment I’ve started writing to a blog post, as described earlier), the interface would adapt, the cross-posting to the socials would become a “blog post share” in the background. This allows me to dynamically adapt where I’m going to post what I’m writing, as I’m writing it.

Having a reading interface with RSS feeds and the social newsfeeds together (with filters, obviously) replicates what actually happens on the socials when people share their blog posts (or even have an account for their blog) on the socials. This is more elegant, because it’s the actual subscription to the actual blog content, and doesn’t depend on the blogger making their content available through the socials.

Loose ends: comments elsewhere, web interface, modular

At this point we’ve got something that is really nicely integrated, but one thing is missing: comments made on other blogs. I dwelled on this a bit in part 1: this is one of the issues that coComment or Disqus tried to solve.

If the comment is made through the blogging-reading tool, it’s quite easy to capture (content and permalink, even title to the blog post it’s on). The only question would be how to display these comments (if desired, of course). In the sidebar (“my comments elsewhere”)? Collected in round-up posts like what comes from the socials (“my comments on other blogs this week”)? People will want different things, but it should be part of the package to make this possible.

What about comments made directly on other blogs? In an ideal world, the receiving blog would “notify” (webmention?) the commenter’s blog of the comment just made. But there would also have to be a way for the commenter to “secure” their comment, in case the blog in question doesn’t have the notification feature. I guess there are ways to do that with bookmarklets, browser extensions, or the like. Or why not by “sharing” the page one commented upon to the blogging-reading tool, with a way to indicate “there’s a comment of mine on this page”?

Throughout this post I’ve spoken about this integrated “tool” (or maybe app at times). As I see it, it should definitely have a web interface, like my WordPress blog has. Or Discourse. And be something that can be self-hosted, or managed. Apps are nice, but I think it’s clear today that tools or services should be available both through a “website” and an app.

It may seem like I’m describing “one more app/tool to rule them all”, but in my mind it’s not like that. I’m describing a set of principles. Just like we have various tools which allow blogging or reading RSS today, or various clients for Mastodon, this should not be a lock-in for a particular tool. Those with better understanding than me of ActivityPub, RSS, APIs and the like are most welcome to elaborate on how various protocols or frameworks could work together or be extended to make this kind of thing possible.

As I see it, with an agreement of how these different general features function, we could even go towards more modular tools, where I could use a WordPress base for blogging, which would be compatible with something derived from Openvibe for the socials integration, and have the choice between a future iteration of FeedLand or WordPress Reader or NetNewsWire for the reading part – and they would all integrate seamlessly in such a manner that I will not feel like I am using multiple tools, but one. There could even be add-ons/plugins (I heard this idea in this OTM interview of Jay Graber) to manage how you filter your RSS+socials timeline (algorithm? no algorithm? labelling?), how you mashup your socials of the day into pretty blogs posts – or not, etc.

I have the intuitive hope that something approaching my present pipe dream can be built around WordPress – particularly after hearing Dave Winer invite us to think differently about WordPress. I’m curious to see if what he’s cooking us with WordLand brings us in the kind of direction I’m thinking about. And of course, if you know of anything that makes what I’m talking about here reality, comment away!

PS Dave: haven’t yet listened to the podcasts (Exploring WordPress, Textcasting, and Open Web Standards and Dave Winer on Decentralisation, WordPress and Open Publishing), but I will. It was either listen or write, I chose write!

PPS everyone: I didn’t proofread and I feel my writing is more clunky than usual today, sorry – brain still recovering. Point out the typos and broken sentences and I’ll go and fix them!

PPPS: might do a part 4 on privacy, and need to cover non-text content better, in addition to going into more detail regarding “Today on the socials” posts, so chances are there will be more in this series, at some point…

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!

More blogging in the world? [en]

Originally meant as a comment on the post Back to the Blog by Dan Cohen.

Over the years (quite some years ago) I ran a handful of “back2blog” challenges, to try and get people writing on their blogs again. They worked, but once the challenge was over, we all folded back into Facebook.

I’ve been writing more on my blog these last six months or so. One thing that helped me was to try and go back to the early days of pre-social-media blogging, when I’d write much shorter pieces than the essay-like ones. I realised that one of the things that made me write things that could very well have been blog posts on facebook rather than on my blog was that I had come to see blog posts as “articles”, complete with a proper title, appropriate categories and tags, and to make it worse, as I’m bilingual, a short summary of what I was writing in my “other language”.

To do that, I started posting things as “asides” — a post type WordPress provides with for somewhat lesser content. I also decided that my 45-minute commute on the train was more than enough time to crank out a quick post, and when I’m not travelling with colleagues, I really make an effort to write stuff.

I really believe that unless Facebook et al backpedal in making their platforms less addictive (cf. Clay Shirky’s segment in this OTM episode) we are definitely going to see people falling back on their blogs.

Now let me go and find a no-nonsense-no-frills newsreader so I can subscribe to Dan’s blog.

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.

A bunch of links [en]

A few links I picked up.

The war to sell you a mattress is an internet nightmare

My thoughts about this aren’t quite coherent, because it comes and hits right where I had some ambivalence about a category of work I did over the last decade. Not so much because I wasn’t comfortable with what I was doing, but because I could see it was somewhere on a spectrum where things, at some point, became unethical.

The mattress story is way far out there for me.

But where is the breaking/tipping point? Where does building a community of fans or ambassadors, or simply seeking them out to solidify a brand or organization’s relationship with them, veer into “buying influence”?

I had the first really bad sniff of this when early bloggers started getting paid to do promotional postings.

I suspect the answer has something to do with scale. If an influencer can make or break a business, then he is part of that business and that relationship should be absolutely transparent. Or is my reasoning too simplistic? I long for one of these slow blog-to-blog discussions on the topic.

The world’s most expensive free watch

Welcome to the world of dropshipping, affiliate marketing, and the rest. The world of people making a pile of money online teaching people to make a pile of money online by selling stuff. Only the people teaching you how to do it are making money off the teaching, not the “selling other stuff”.

This stinks.

I had a whiff of it last summer, when I realised that one of the (multiple) reasons my freelance business had been going under was that I hated sales and sucked at it. So I decided to look at what a bunch of these online marketers were doing. I took some free webinars. Subscribed to newsletters. Watched them sell.

And of course, googled them. Despite all they tell you, and the lucky incident, they’re making their money promising to tell you how to make money. Most people will spend quite a bit of cash on courses, and not find success, because, well, luck. And a broken business model.

I shared a bunch of interesting articles I unearthed through my googling on Facebook at the time. I might try and dig them out, or you can try your luck at googling too.

De l’exploitation en milieu fermier écolo

In French, but worth sticking in Google Translate if you don’t speak the language. Remember how people got all annoyed (me included, at times) when “crowdfunding” became a way to cut costs and get people to do work for your profitable business for free?

Well, look no further if you want to see how so-called “sustainable” agricultural methods work. Not the serious ones, which use science to minimise the amounts of pesticides and fertiliser we need. I’m talking about the “organic” and “natural” lobbies and movements, often headed by guru-like figures like Pierre Rabhi. Wwoofing, anybody? Or how to make your unsustainable farming practice sustainable by exploiting free labour.

I’m annoyed that people aren’t more appalled by these practices, simply because they profit businesses which are ethically aligned with their ideology.

Go ahead, Millenials, destroy us

This one is encouraging. When I start despairing about where the world is going, which is quite often these days (and a new thing to me — 45 getting elected changed that), I remember that there are young people growing up to run the world, and that they might do things completely differently from us. It gives me hope. I’m looking forward to meeting them.

To end on a light note, read Kirk Drift if you like Star Trek. I recently started watching the original series (before my android TV box died) and though it was fun, I was having a really hard time with the cultural gap — both in terms of screenplay, assumed character psychology, and of course, sexism. Somebody pointed me to the excellent article I just linked to, and it made me watch the series completely differently. I find Kirk way less annoying. And the miniskirts (I hadn’t realised that at the time they were the symbol of women claiming their power! talk about judging something from another time by today’s standards…)

Less Facebook, Less Phone [en]

[fr] Moins de Facebook et de téléphone en ôtant l'app (restera l'ordi et l'iPad). Une collection de liens et de réflexions sur ce que sont devenus ces "médias sociaux" qui sont maintenant un "canal de distribution de contenu" dans lequel injecter des conversations est un pitch de startup.

I read this yesterday and removed the Facebook application from my phone again. Again, because I had done it a few months ago. I reinstalled it upon the death of a friend, who was also the founder of an online community I manage, and I needed to be connected better during those times. And I didn’t remove it afterwards (when is “afterwards”, when somebody dies?)

So, I’ve removed it now. I have a wristwatch again, too – have had for a few months. I like not having to take my phone out to know what time it is.

I’ve decided it was time to put my phone in flight mode during the night again, too, and I intend to leave it off for the first hour of the day. We’ll see how that goes. The next step will be implementing a shutdown time at night, too. I’d done it sometime back – no tech after 9pm.

For months now, it’s been bothering me. Maybe years. So much fear and outrage online. I’m sick of the outrage. What I fled when I stopped watching TV news has now caught up with me on Facebook. I remember this French TV executive who said very openly that they were in the business of selling “available brain time” to advertisers. Nothing has changed, it’s just online too now. I’m acutely aware how often I am “stuck on Facebook” when in fact I wanted to be doing something else. I feel a bit like a fool to have believed the digital world was something different. It was just because it was new.

As I am coming to terms with an upcoming shift in my career focus, which will probably mean “less social media”, I am reminded of what brought me here when I hear a startup pitching a social network that will “bring conversation” into social media, and describing social media as “content distribution”. I came here for people. For relationships. For conversations. For the web we lost, probably.

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.

Stratégie médias sociaux: à distance ou en dialogue? [fr]

[en] I'm always astonished when I hear about people developing social media strategies for a client "on their own". For me, the strategy emerges from the discussion between two parties, each bringing their expertise to the table: social media, and the company/context the strategy is for. I sell a process rather than strategies.

Je me souviens de la première fois qu’on m’a explicitement demandé de “pondre” une stratégie médias sociaux. Pas avec ces mots, bien sûr. On m’a demandé, après un entretien d’embauche, de “juste” mettre par écrit une stratégie pour l’organisation en question.

J’étais à la fois estomaquée et confuse: premièrement, je ne m’attendais pas à ce qu’on me donne une “mission” (et j’ignorais totalement que ce genre de chose se pratiquait, m’étant présentée à un seul véritable entretien d’embauche dans ma vie), et deuxièmement, produire de mon côté, en toute autonomie, une “stratégie médias sociaux” me paraissait d’un non-sens sans nom.

Au fil des années, j’ai rencontré à plusieurs reprises cette idée de production de stratégie médias sociaux “à distance” de l’organisation qu’elle concerne. Comme exercice pour des étudiants, comme demande de la part de clients potentiels, ou encore de la part d’agences.

Et je ne comprends toujours pas.

Pour moi, une stratégie est le résultat d’une rencontre: moi, qui amène à la table mon expertise en médias sociaux, et le client, qui amène à la table son expertise sur son organisation et les contraintes et moyens qui fournissent le cadre dans lequel on travaille. La stratégie émerge de la discussion. Pas de mon cerveau, ex nihilo, après avoir absorbé quelques généralités concernant mon client.

Du coup, ça m’a aidé à être plus claire avec mes clients — qu’ils soient le “client final” ou non. Je ne vends pas des stratégies, mais un processus d’accompagnement pour développer ensemble la stratégie. Economie d’énergie, économie d’argent, économie de temps. Une approche née du monde numérique, dans lequel il coûte peu de tester une idée directement, de planifier en cours de route, plutôt que de prendre des lustres “hors terrain” pour tenter de deviner ce qui prendra.

Certes, la planification a sa place. Mais des fois, il vaut mieux faire, et voir.

(Scoop: je suis restée indépendante.)