Tag: comments

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!

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!

Facebook Suspension: Day 11 [en]

It’s been 11 days since my Facebook account was suspended. Where are things at?

The appeal, predictably, didn’t yield any results. No response, no e-mail, no change, nothing. I have no other “official” appeal routes, as I cannot access the platform at all. So I wrote up my appeal in a blog post.

What you can do to help: share my story or my appeal, give visibility to my situation – including on Facebook where I have become inexistant. If you know people who might know people, please ask. It seems pretty clear that unless a case manages to gather the attention of the right people (including, it seems, through the media), not much will happen. Going public helps. A huge thanks to those of you who have already shared my posts or updates, reached out to your networks, etc. Facebook is where I had the most reach, and without it, I am struggling to raise awareness on my situation. The reach I have in normal times is, of course, abnormal. A working system should not depend on people having a platform or connections to work right and be fair.

False Positives

My old friend Kevin Marks pointed me to this extremely interesting article: Cost of False Positives (Kellan Elliott-McCrea). Two take-aways:

  • with scale, false positives in identifying abuse of a social site create a huge problem to deal with, even when the detection methods are “very good”; Kellan runs through some numbers, and it’s way beyond what I could have imagined (and the article was written nearly 15 years ago)
  • early adopters (like me!) are outliers in the data and are at higher risk of “looking funny” to abuse detection algorithms; indeed, we are not “normal users”; I share huge quantities of links; my account goes back nearly two decades so there are lots of publications to sift through and which might be flagged; I am at times extremely active in (human) ways which could seem “unhuman”: amount and type of content, speed, etc.

Automation

Just now, I was reading this article from Ars Technica: Social Media Probably Can’t Be Fixed. (It’s an open tab in my browser, not too sure how it go there.) It feels like it.

Even at my social “scale”, when I think about the main community I run (diabetic cats, 7k members), we run into scale issues where it becomes more and more difficult to treat everybody fairly and in a human way. And when I think of how to improve things from a management perspective (because volunteer ressources are limited, always will be) I find myself thinking in terms of automation, how to use AI to support the team doing content moderation or to improve the “member journey” in the community. Less personal, less human.

With automation, you get scale (and with scale you end up needing automation), but with that, you lose personal connection and at some point it comes crumbling down.

Life Without Facebook

How have I been coping with being un-facebooked? Well, beyond the shock and the hurt and the grief and the anger and the injustice of it all, and setting aside the extra “admin work” this is adding to my plate, being forced off Facebook has done two things for me:

  • regroup on my blog and other platforms, and in the process, get to experience different “connection spaces” than the main one I had on Facebook
  • imagine a life without/after Facebook: less connection maybe, a slower pace – I am getting to measure how “caught up” I get in the platform and how good it is at keeping me there.

Before we go all “silver linings”: this sucks. I didn’t need this. It has been extremely distressing and has had a negative impact on my health, in particular my recovery from post-concussion syndrome after my accident. I feel more disconnected and isolated, because I have lost my access to the people I was in touch with on a daily basis (some of them “online-only” friends, many of them not). Life on Facebook continues without me. I’m not being flooded with mails and messages of people asking me what’s going on or how I’m doing. It’s mainly silence.

Losing my content is also dreadful. I’ve spent some time this week-end going through my various archives from various platforms and tools over the years, organising them somewhat, checking they actually work, and exporting recent archives of the places I’m still at. My last proper facebook export is nearly 10 years old. I mentioned before, I think, that I tried to do an export in June, but gave up because it required me to manually download 52 files weighing 2Gb each, at a snail’s pace, and which made my network drop. The “export to Google Drive” didn’t work. So, my stuff on Facebook is a 104Gb export. Outliers in the data, anybody?

Why I’m Fighting

I made the choice to try and fight this, instead of sitting back and saying “oh well, that’s that”. I made the choice to fight because it is meaningful to me in different ways:

  • I care about my content locked up in the platform and would like to get it back.
  • I run a busy support group there, thankfully with a wonderful team who is holding the fort, despite being worn out by six months of my post-accident absence and a couple more years of me struggling to make time for the community amidst the other stuff going on in my life; I also have two decades worth of connections on the platform, which I do not want to just “cut off” like that – be it regarding the community or my network, real relationships are at stake, and if the future is away from Facebook, I want to be able to manage the transition and not be thrown off the plane in mid-air.
  • I am not alone: this is not just about me, but about a systemic, structural issue that has real impact on thousands of people’s lives; I’m lucky I don’t have a business that depends on my facebook presence anymore, but it could have been the case. Others aren’t that lucky. We are innocent casualties in the war against the bad actors of online social spaces, and deserve some kind of justice.
  • Meta, as a company, and Facebook, as a platform, want to play an important role in shaping our world. They want to be an indispensable tool for businesses, and also for normal people, without which they have no value for businesses. To me, it is unethical to have such ambition regarding their role in society and not provide even a semblance of support to those who make it possible – even if, as the saying goes, they “are the product”, because they do not pay. In my small modest way, taking a stand against enshittification.

This means that for the last 11 days, in addition to dealing with the impact of this suspension, I have been looking up articles, searching for solutions, writing blog posts, posting on a bunch of social media platforms I am normally dormant on, DMing friends and vague contacts, drawing up an action plan in my head, and putting my poor injured brain through the ringer to try to figure out what to do, where to start, what to prioritise, who to contact or speak to, in hopes of getting this suspension reversed. All that, knowing that chances are extremely slim and that it is probably useless.

Reconnecting Elsewhere

So, now that you’ve read all that, and without losing sight of it, what has been interesting? Clearly, reconnecting with my blog and feeling motivated to invest in ways of connecting to others and building community where I am not ceding control of everything to the Borg. (No, not that Borg – the new one.) That was already underway, but it has now been prioritised.

It has also made me aware of how facebook encourages a certain type of writing/publication and a certain type of discussion. Not so much in terms of content, but in terms of form. And there is value in doing it differently. I actually wrote some e-mails to people, since my suspension. I shared shorter snippets of stuff (passing thoughts, comments on links I found, ideas, daily anecdotes) because on LinkedIn, Bluesky, Twitter and Mastodon, for example, there are character limits. On my blog there are none, so I have had a chance to ramble along more. I have rediscovered people who left the Facebook boat already and with whom I had lost touch, because I poured almost all my sharing and connecting energy into Facebook.

I also published a couple of videos on Youtube, and plan to do more.

Shared Content

One thing I have become acutely aware of is that even when platforms allow you to export your content, one’s content in a social space is not just one’s publications. It is also comments, participation in the shared content that is a conversation, or a community. All the comments I ever made on Facebook have gone with my suspension. There are conversation threads with holes in them now. All the comments and conversations that took place because I published something, or because I commented and somebody answered – gone. Once people interact with your content, build upon it, it is not 100% yours anymore.

This has been an ongoing preoccupation of mine in shared social spaces. I remember, many many years ago, when blogs were young, a blogger I was actively following deleted their blog one day. And with it, all the comments I had taken the trouble to leave on their posts. “Leaving a comment” does not adequately reflect it, actually. It makes it feel like a small gesture done for the benefit of the other, but it’s not that. A comment can have as much value as a blog post. What makes it a comment is that it is a response, not that it is small or insignificant. It can be something valuable given to the community, and it should not be the right of another person to unilaterally destroy it.

I do not remember who the blogger was. It happened more than once.

Some years back, a few of my contacts on Facebook started a kind of automatic removal of their posts after a certain amount of time had gone by, taking my shares and comments with them. I stopped sharing and commenting on those posts.

I know, the lesson is: if you don’t want something you write to disappear, write it on your blog. But context matters.

Content and Community

This “it’s my content, I’m allowed to delete it” mindset is also an issue in Facebook groups. In the diabetic cat group, it thankfully didn’t happen very often, but when it did, it was infuriating. Somebody would post with an issue. People would expend time and energy in providing good answers and support. Then the person would delete their post, and all the answers with it. The whole point of a support group is that what is said to one person may also help another, who is reading. As a community, we also get to know our members and connect to them, and in that respect, their history in the group is important. Being able to refer back to that history is what allows a support community to function at a certain scale. Facebook does not allow group admins to prevent members from deleting posts and comments – something the platform I’m looking at for the future, Discourse, allows. It’s not all black and white of course, if you post something stupid and want to remove it an instant later, you can. But you can’t take down whole comment threads because you don’t like your post anymore. Participating in a community comes with a certain amount of responsibility towards other members of that community.

On the web side: Cool URIs don’t change. And also: cool content doesn’t disappear.

So, back to Facebook, what has been lost – for me, but also for others – is not just my posts and the pages of my cats, but it’s also a shared history, through discussions in comment threads and reposts on other people’s walls.

If we were connected on Facebook, and you would like to stay in touch, think about subscribing to this blog, and find me on the socials of your choice: Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads or LinkedIn. I’m still on the bird site but not very active there. I want to do more videos on Youtube, so it might be a good move to subscribe to my channel. I haven’t managed to recover my Tiktok account, so that’s that for the time being. I also have Instagram and Flickr (dormant, maybe it needs waking up), and I’ve created a little WhatsApp community – mainly francophone – where you can get announcements when I publish something here and a little chat-space with others and me, a kind of weird version of my Facebook wall off Facebook (ask me to join).

Of course, I always like it when people leave comments. I promise not to delete my blog.

Stories to Listen to, Moderating Blog Comments, Teaching Blogging [en]

[fr] Deux ou trois épisodes de podcasts à écouter. Quelques réflexions sur les commentaires de blog (spam ou non?) et la difficulté d'apprendre à bloguer.

Listen to Greetings from Coney Island. I swear you won’t be disappointed. Just don’t make the same mistake I did, and be a bit distracted early on, not realising there are two parallel stories, told by two women with (to me) very similar voices. I actually reached the end of the story before realising I had missed the whole point, so I listened to it all again. It was worth it.

vue cham

Another episode of Love+Radio reminded me of a Moth story I heard quite a long time ago now. It’s about a volunteer at a suicide prevention hotline. That story made me understand something about suicide (which I am lucky not to know from the inside): it’s not about wanting to die, it’s about wanting the pain to stop. Like many Moth stories, it’s beautifully told and very moving. Well worth the small moment of your life you will spend listening to it.

I know, this blog is turning into a podcast review. But not only. See.

One of the challenges I face as editor-in-chief of Open Ears is approving comments. Not so much because we publish controversial articles that have people biting each other’s heads off in the comments (not at all, actually), but more because

  1. spambots are getting better and better at sounding human
  2. some humans are sounding more and more like spambots.

About the latter: people like me have been saying for years that a great way to get your website or blog known is to comment on other blogs. But that’s not quite the whole story. Aligning fluffy or self-promotional comments on other people’s blogs might get your “nofollowed” links out there, but isn’t really going to do what matters, which is encouraging people to actually know you and read your stuff because they’re interested. Clicks and visits only really mean anything if they come from the heart.

So what does work? Well, actually, being a valued member of the communities you are part of. At the time, during the Golden Age of Blogging, leaving meaningful comments on blogs you read and linked to was a way of being that. It’s not about the links, it’s about the place you respectfully take or are given willingly. Add value. Be helpful. Try and make friends. That’s the spirit of “leaving comments”.

Which brings me to an important piece of blogging advice I came up with while trying to teach my latest batch of students the basics of blogging (it was, to put it kindly, a mixed success): blog about stuff that’s in your head. Write about what you know. If you have to google around to factcheck this or that, find a link, or look up a detail, that’s fine. But if you find yourself doing research and reading up to gather the material for your blog post (and the post is not about your research), chances are you’re “doing it wrong”.

Blogging is this weird thing which as at the same time so easy (for “natural bloggers”) but so hard to learn or teach. I think that is because it touches upon “being” more than “doing”. It’s about daring a certain degree of authenticity that we are not encouraged to wear in our school or professional lives. And it’s definitely not how we learn to write. In a way, teaching blogging is a bit like trying to teach people to dare to be themselves in public. This makes you think of Brené Brown and vulnerability, does it not? Exactly. And that is why, I think, blogging is a powerful tool to connect people.

Measuring a Blog's Success: Visitors and Comments Don't Cut It [en]

[fr] Un blog, c'est un investissement à long terme. Six mois, un an au moins sans se poser de questions, avant d'essayer de voir si "ça marche" ou pas. Et ne mesurez pas son succès aux visiteurs et aux commentaires. Plutôt, trouvez un moyen plus qualitatif de mesurer les bénéfices que vous en retirez, en vous basant sur la raison pour laquelle vous tenez ce blog.

Interestingly, a large part of my work right now seems to revolved around blogging. I’m happy about that. I’ve been blogging for over 10 years now, and went I became self-employed mid-2006 the first “title” I used was “blogging consultant”. Because back then, it was about blogs (and maybe wikis, and maybe social software, but not “social media”).

Anyway, I digress.

What I want to point out is that if you start a blog, or your company starts a blog, it’s important to have realistic expectations about the kind of benefits you’ll reap, and when, and how to measure them.

Even in 2011, too many people imagine that if you’re doing a good job with your blog, it will translate into thousands of visits per day and dozens of comments within a few weeks.

No way.

Those blogs with thousands of visits per day and dozens of comments are edge-cases, and have probably been at it for longer than you have.

Blogs and comments are actually not a good way of measuring the success of a blog. Honestly, if your blog has a few hundred readers a day and you get a comment now and again, you’re doing fine.

To measure the success of your blog, you need to think back to the reason you’re doing it. What do you want to get out of it? Chances are that “having as many people as possible visit it” is not the reason you’re doing it.

Maybe you want to change the perception people have of you. Maybe you want to showcase certain things you’re doing. Maybe you want to attract a certain type of person — reader, writer, or contributor. Maybe it’s the “marketing budget” for your business. Maybe you want to share a passion. Maybe you want an outlet to express yourself.

There are many reasons to want a blog. And most of them are perfectly valid (one that’s not, most of the time: make money with it).

But don’t go around measuring readers and comments to judge your success just because they’re convenient numbers.

Maybe what you need to do is create a scrapbook of all the things people spontaneously say about your blog, online or off. Maybe you need to make a list of events or situations where your blog was an ice-breaker or opened doors for you.

That seems to make way more sense than counting visits and comments. I mean, if those are so important to make somebody happy, they can be gamed.

Blogging takes time. It takes time because it takes time to think, write, link, tag, categorize, illustrate, title, proof, and publish. It takes time to be creative, and if your ambition for your blog is to be more than a collection of breaking news, hot topics and catchy headlines, blogging is a creative job.

But blogging also takes time because it’s a long-term strategy. When blogging started being hot, there were these numbers flying around, telling us that the average blog on the web was 3 months old and had 3 articles (or something like that). People started blogging, and abandoned their blogs very quickly.

When starting a blog, I wouldn’t worry about if it’s working or not before at least six months or a year. People are in such a hurry nowadays. All this hype about real-time, the internet being a place of unprecedented speed, the acceleration of innovation, not to say the “overnight successes” we keep hearing about but which languished in obscurity for ages before coming to the light. And even if there are real “overnight sensations”, they are, as I said above, edge cases.

And your blog will not be an edge case.

Your blog can work fine and do its job, but it will not be an edge case.

Unless your blog is your product — and in this case you’re clearly in the media business, and not using your blog as a communication tool — it is not to be looked at as a service or product people are going to use everyday and flock to. Instead, it’s a collection of valuable, long-lasting, well-indexed information. It’s the expression of something. It colours who you are.

And that takes time — not just the time of labour, but the days and months flying by in the calendar, so that value can accumulate, and become valuable.

Let me sum up this long rambling post in a few points:

  • blogging is a long-term strategy: it will take many months or even years for you to see what benefits it’s actually bringing you
  • don’t obsess on visitors and comments; instead, focus on what is said about your blog, and the opportunities it brings, in terms of contacts, open doors, favorable dispositions (qualitative measurement rather than quantitative)

Catching up With Backtype [en]

[fr] BackType: pour voir les commentaires que je fais dans la blogosphère, l'impact "social" de mon blog, les derniers tweets qui le référencent, et un plugin WordPress (TweetCount) qui va remplacer TechMeme pour moi, simplement parce qu'il liste effectivement les tweets référençant l'article en question, ce que TechMeme ne fait pas.

Image representing BackType as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase

A few weeks ago I read that BackType was going to discontinue the BackType Connect plugin that I had used some time back here on CTTS, which prompted me to (a bit hastily, I’ll admit) make a comment about how you’re really better off not relying on a third party for hosting your comments (which is not what BackType does, my bad).

The BackType Connect plugin took offsite reactions to your blog posts (tweets, for example) and published them as comments. I have to say I was never really really happy with the plugin: installing it made me realize that most mentions of my posts on Twitter were retweets (or spambots) and that I didn’t want to mix that kind of “reaction” with my comments. At one point the plugin really stopped working (or gave me some kind of grief) and I dropped it.

I actually liked BackType a lot when they started out, and I owe them big time for saving hundreds of my blog comments when I dropped my database early 2009. Even though I wasn’t using their plugin, I was unhappy about the announcement — and even more unhappy when I discovered that my user page had disappeared (yes, the one displaying all the comments I’d made on other blogs and this one, which replaced what I’d used coComment for).

BackType, however, did something I liked a lot, and wished TweetMeme had done: allow me to see all the latest tweets linking to Climb to the Stars. This prompted me to take a closer look at what BackType was actually still doing, and report my findings of interest back to you, dear readers.

  1. Good surprise: BackType actually does still allow me to track comments I make all over the blogosphere — but it uses my URL rather than my user account to identify me.
  2. Already mentioned: tweets linking to my blog. Including old ones.
  3. The social impact of any URL: tweets, comments and friendfeed mentions over time, complete with mugshots of “top influencers“.
  4. TweetCount plugin, which is probably going to replace the TweetMeme plugin I was using until now,  because BackType actually lists tweets linking back to a post (compare with the TweetMeme page for the same post). I’ve always found TweetMeme a bit too close to Digg and TechMeme (you know I’m no fan of the race for popularity or breaking news). TweetCount counts a few less tweets than TechMeme, and I suspect its results are cleaner.
  5. If you like displaying tweets mentioning your posts on your blog, you should also check out the BackTweets plugin.

Does BackType do anything else that seems precious to you?

Conversation fragmentation is still an issue in today’s blogosphere, but tools like BackType (and even the Facebook Like button!) are helping is stitch the different pieces together.

Twitter Killed My Blog and Comments Killed Our Links [en]

I hope the provocative title grabbed your attention.

Let me say it straight out: my blog is not dead, neither are our links.

But I still have a point.

Twitter is IRC on steroids, for those of you who have already experienced the irresistable draw of a chatroom full of smart witty people, 24/7. Twitter is my very own IRC channel, where I do not have to hear those I do not care about. It’s less geeky than IRC, which means that many of my “online spaces” collide there.

It’s intoxicating. I love it. I can spend all day there.

But that’s not why I would provocatively say that it has killed my blog. Twitter is a content-sharing space, not just a super IRC channel. Found an interesting link? Five years ago, it would have morphed into a blog post, because that was pretty much the only way to share it. Nowadays, dump it in Twitter. Arrived safely at destination? Again, 5 years ago, blog post. Now, tweet.

New tools have an impact on how we use old tools. Sometimes we abandon them altogether, but most of the time, we just redefine the way we use them. This is what I was trying to explore in the first panel I ever moderated, at BlogTalk 2008 (crappy video).

So, no, Twitter did not kill my blog, but take a group of bloggers and give them Twitter accounts, and the temperature of the blogosphere changes. All the high-speed stuff moves to Twitter.

If you just look at the present, it’s no big deal. People are still connecting. That’s what all this social media/software is about, right? Connecting people. Online. But the problem with us spending all our time swimming in the real-time stream is that it’s just that, a real-time stream. Not much is left of it once it has passed.

Take this short piece about translation I wrote nearly 10 years ago. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s still there, as readable as it was when I wrote it. Had this taken place on Twitter, nothing much would be left of it. Gone with the wind, if I dare say.

Many many years ago when I first started blogging (can you tell I’m on a nostalgic streak?), blogs did not have comments. Hell, I barely even had permalinks when I started. Permalinks were the key, though: they allowed bloggers to link to each other’s writings.

And we did. Conversations would bounce from blog to blog. They weren’t chatty like on IM, IRC, or Twitter. They were blog-post-speed conversations. We would have to think (a little) before we wrote.

Even though comments are a wonderful invention and I would never want to take them back, they did ruin this, in a way. People started leaving comments all over the place and didn’t come back to their blogs to write about the conversations they were participating in. It’s one of the reasons I was so excited about coComment when it came out, or services like BackType (which also seems to have backed out of tracking comments one makes) or Disqus. (Aside: see, I’d love somebody to hire me to do some research and write a memo on the current state of the comment-tracking-sphere and all the players involved. I could totally see myself doing that.)

With comments came less of an incentive to link to each other on our blogs. With Twitter (and Facebook), less of an incentive to share certain things on our blogs, and also, less of an incentive to comment, as it became much easier to just “tweet a quickie” to the post author (therefore making our activity visible to all our followers). And with the death of Technorati tags (I’ll call it that), we bloggers are now connecting to each other on other social networks than the blogosphere.

I think it’s time to actively reclaim the blogosphere as our own, after leaving it for too long at the hands of marketing and PR.

Bloggers, it’s time to wake up! Write blog posts. Link to your fellow bloggers. Leave comments on their posts, or better, respond to them on your blogs.

We don’t have to abandon Twitter and Facebook — just remember that first and foremost, we are writers, and that “conversation” (though ’tis a wonderful thing) is not writing.

Comment Ownership, Reloaded [en]

Nearly four years ago, I wrote a post about comment ownership and coComment (it was initially published on their blog, and I moved it over here at some point). I don’t use coComment anymore, but a few of the points I made then are still valid.

Comment ownership is a complex problem. The commenter writes the comment, but the blog owner hosts it. So of course, the blog owner has the right to decide what he agrees to host or not. But the person who wrote the comment might also want to claim some right to his writing once it’s published.

And also the following:

There are times when one could say the “blog owner rights” and “comment writer’s rights” come into conflict. How do you manage such situations?

Here’s an example. Somebody e-mails me, out of the blue, to ask me to remove a comment of his on a post published ages ago (ironically, it’s the post published just before the one I’m quoting above!)

I went to look at the comment in question, and frankly, it’s completely innocuous. So I googled that person’s name and realised that my post appears somewhere in the middle of the first page of results. This gives me a guess as to why the person is contacting me to remove the comment.

And really, it seems pretty petty to me. And removing that comment bugs me, because I responded to it, and the person responded back, so what the person is in fact asking me to do is to remove (or dismember) a conversation in the comments of my blog, which has been sitting there for nearly four years. All that because they’re not happy that CTTS makes their comment appear somewhere on the first page of results for a Google search on their name.

Which brings me back to comment ownership. Saying the comment belongs to the commentator is simplistic. C’mon, if everybody who left a comment on CTTS these last 10 years started e-mailing me to remove them because they “taint” their ego-googling, I simply wouldn’t have time to deal with all the requests.

But saying the comment belongs to the blog owner is simplistic too.

I think we’re in a situation which mirrors (in complexity) that of photography ownership between model and photographer. With the added perk that in the case of blog comments, as soon as it is published, the comment becomes part of a conversation that the community is taking part in. Allowing people to remove published comments on a whim breaks that. (Just like bloggers don’t usually delete posts unless there is a very strong reason to do so — when published, it becomes part of something bigger than itself, that we do not own.)

So, for this situation, I guess the obvious response is to change the full name to initials or a nickname, and leave the comment.

But I see this with discussion lists, too. The other day, a pretty annoyed woman was complaining that somebody had called her out of the blue about coworking, when she was not at all interested in sharing an office space. Well, she had written a message or two on a local coworking discussion list, with all her contact details in signature.

What do you expect? And what happened to taking a deep breath and deciding “OK, I’ll do things differently in the future” when you realise you behaved a little cluelessly in the past?

I think all this concern about e-reputation is going to start becoming a real pain in the neck. Get over it, people. Open a blog and make sure you own your online identity, and you can stop worrying about the comments you made four years ago.

Conversation in Comments vs. Conversation in Twitter [en]

[fr] Twitter n'est pas en train de tuer les conversations dans les commentaires des blogs. Le bavardage s'est déplacé dans Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook -- mais quand certains disent que la conversation y est meilleure, ils ignorent le fait qu'il y a plusieurs sortes de conversation.

Hey, another “vs.” post! It must be because I get tired quickly of people comparing apples and oranges, and saying that we’re not going to eat apples anymore because we now have oranges.

A good year and a half ago there was some talk around the fact that the conversation had moved out of blogs and into Twitter and Friendfeed.

That’s not quite true: some of the conversation has moved from blog comments into the stream. The chatter, mainly.

Just like, when comments first started appearing on weblogs (remember those times, folks?) — well, some of the conversation that was happening from blog post to blog post moved into the comments.

But there was already conversation. Blogs without comments are still blogs.

So, what has happened? The more immediate, chat-like conversation has indeed moved out of blog comments and into Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed-like services. The short one-liners. But the real value-adding comments, those that make the conversation meaningful, those that actually discuss in depth what the blogger wrote, or contribute something beyond “great post” or “load of horseshit” — those are still there in our blog comments.

I see a parallel here with the distinction I make between live-tweeting and live-blogging. I’m not anti-Twitter or anti-anything: I love Twitter, and use it for more than my fair share of chatter. But the chatter of today most often has lost its appeal tomorrow, and will not take the place of deep conversation that one can catch up with even once it has gone cold.

This, by the way, is also the root of my dislike of threaded conversations on blogs.

WordPress on my iPhone [en]

Wow, just checking out the new WordPress iPhone app. It now allows comment moderation management, post and page editing, as well as saving non-local drafts. I’m going to start using it regularly… Though maybe not for writing my usual unending posts for CTTS!