Tag: twitter

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!

Twitter Exodus and Mastodon [en]

My online world is abuzz with people leaving Twitter, discussing Twitter, discussing what Elon Musk is doing with Twitter and its employees, and how Mastodon is going to deal with the influx of Twitter refugees, in a September that never ended kind of way.

Clearly, my Twitter usage has seriously dwindled over the years. I joined early – December 2006. A few internet lifetimes ago. Facebook has clearly taken over my online presence, and if I’m making an overt effort to be present elsewhere, it’s here, on this blog. TikTok makes me feel old, and miss the good ol’ days we had with Seesmic.

So I’m not “leaving” Twitter. I honestly rarely saw the point of ever “leaving” anything. I tend to fade away. But I’ve had a mastodon account, on octodon.social, since April 17th 2017, my mailbox tells me. It was the first time in a long time that a new platform started showing up on my radar and it felt worth trying it out. I even wrote about it in my newsletter (looks like this is a post I forgot to import here… note for later). But I didn’t use it much. I’d drop in every now and again to see how things were, like I was doing with Twitter these last years.

Given so many people are joining Mastodon now, I looked for an easier way to find the people I’m following on Twitter there: fedfinder really helped (tip: add your Mastodon handle somewhere in your username or description so that scrapers such as this one can find it) and allowed me to follow a good hundred people or so I knew on Mastodon, in a few clicks and a few minutes of patience. So, now my Mastodon news feed feels a bit more like a familiar place. It still has the feel of the social media platforms of old, in the early days, but I’m not sure it will last.

What is happening with Twitter is making me think of other social situations where the good people leave because bad things are happening, and the only ones left in the room at the end are the bullies or the extremists. That’s one of the reasons I’m not leaving. I’m not fighting for the platform either, but I don’t want to remove myself and contribute to creating the void into which ugliness can freely pour.

I feel sad about what’s happening. The sadness of the favorite park or field of your childhood being bulldozed to build apartment blocks. The sadness of a restaurant you used to hang out with changing owners and becoming unrecognisable. The sadness of the world changing, whether it’s leaving you behind, or you leaving it behind.

I honestly don’t think Twitter will survive this, at least not in a form that will be recognisable as the Twitter we knew and loved. But it’s not time for me to pull the plug on it yet.

Newsletters in 2016 [en]

[fr]

Réflexion sur les newsletters en 2016 et le rôle qu'elles peuvent jouer. Méditations sur les blogs, leur désenchantement, Facebook, et Twitter. Je pense qu'il y a un potentiel avec les newsletters de retrouver un sentiment de communauté restreinte et de connexion qui s'est un peu perdu en route avec notre immersion perpétuelle dans notre propre réseau.

Prêts à tenter l'aventure avec moi? Voici mes newsletters, faites votre choix:

For years now, I’ve been thinking about using newsletters better. Or simply, using newsletters. Until recently all I had was a pretty dead newsletter on MailChimp — and the ability for my readers to subscribe to CTTS blog posts and a weekly dump of all the links I save to Delicious.

MailChimp is a powerful tool, probably overkill for me, and I never really managed to ease myself into its process. Sending out an e-mail is dead simple, but sending out my newsletter felt like more work than cranking out a blog post.

Sunset

Two tools caught my eye over the last year: Revue and TinyLetter (acquired by MailChimp, what a coincidence!)

Revue is designed to help you send out curated lists of links. TinyLetter is a barebones newsletter tool, just what I need.

I’ve been trying to analyse my recent excitement for newsletters over the past days. Like others, I’ve been grieving what I think of as the golden age of blogging. I stumbled upon Tiny Letters to the Web We Miss, which I think hits the nail on the head:

Self-publishing online was fluid and inviting in the early years because the community was self-selecting — the sort of people who would know what Blogspot was in 2003. I didn’t worry about my boss finding my blog. I didn’t worry about getting rape threats in the comments either. (Just thinking about how absurd that sentence would have sounded in 2003 is giving me a crater-sized hit of nostalgia.) We didn’t have the same worries over public personas, because the internet felt like it was just us.

Blogging before social media was like drinking with friends. If someone adjacent to your conversation said something interesting, you would pull up a chair and invite them in. Sometimes a friendly stranger would even buy you a drink.

Everybody is here now, it’s not “just us” anymore.

This reminds me of In Praise of Online Obscurity by Clive Thompson, which I wrote about in 2010. At some point of growth, your “community” dissolves into an “audience” (on Twitter, on blogs) or a “network” (on Facebook). Engagement drops. People retreat.

Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote. “They feel they can’t possibly be the person who’s going to make the useful contribution,” Evans says. So the conversation stops. Evans isn’t alone. I’ve heard this story again and again from those who’ve risen into the lower ranks of microfame. At a few hundred or a few thousand followers, they’re having fun — but any bigger and it falls apart. Social media stops being social. It’s no longer a bantering process of thinking and living out loud. It becomes old-fashioned broadcasting.

This dynamic is behind the somewhat counter-intuitive fact that more followers on Twitter does not mean more influence, and that getting a boost in followers through presence on a list doesn’t mean more retweets or replies.

Already at the time of my 2010 article, this was how I analysed what had happened to blogging:

I think that this is one of the things that has happened to the blogging world (another topic I have simmering for one of these days). Eight-ten years ago, the community was smaller. Having a thousand or so readers a day already meant that you were a big fish. Now, being a big fish means that you’re TechCrunch or ReadWriteWeb, publications that for some reason people still insist on calling “blogs”, and we “normal bloggers” do not recognize ourselves anymore in these mega-publications. The “big fish” issue here is not so much that formerly-big-fish bloggers have had the spotlight stolen from them and they resent it (which can also be true, by the way), but more that the ecosystem has completely changed.

The “blog-reading community” has grown hugely in numbers. Ten years ago, one thousand people reading a blog felt special because they were out-of-the-mainstream, they could connect with the author of what they read, and maybe they also had their own little blog somewhere. Nowadays, one thousand people reading a blog are just one thousand people doing the mainstream thing online people do: reading blogs and the like. The sense of specialness has left the blogosphere.

So there you have it. We “lost” something when the internet went from “just us” to “everyone”: part of our sense of community. People reading my blog don’t feel special anymore. I don’t even feel that special anymore for writing it. Blogs aren’t special. Numbers have declined, and I’m sure it’s not just due to the fact I’m slipping into old-fartdom and neglecting my beloved blog to romp in the bushes with Facebook.

The place where we go to connect online is Facebook, or Twitter, or Google Plus. We spend our time in real-time, and head out to read this or that when a link nudges us. We might be part of communities inside Facebook groups, or small delimited spaces, but overall we are spending our time just hooked into our network.

When I was directing the SAWI Social Media and Online Communities course, I read this article by Rich Millington about the distinction between communities and followings. I formalised a three-way distinction for my classes in the following way.

Audiences: around non-social products, bloggers, authors, politicians, salespeople, “fame”

  • attracted by you
  • interact with you
  • not interlinked
  • large scale

Networks: to filter information, connect people, search

  • individual relationships
  • two-way
  • interlinked
  • each node is its own centre

Communities: “a group of people who care about each other more than they should” (Cluetrain)

  • common object of interest
  • interactions inside the group
  • human-sized
  • investment of time, emotion, ego
  • around social objects and niche services

A few years later (and even as I was using it to teach), it’s clear this typology is a bit wobbly, and many spaces are hybrids. But it remains a useful thinking tool.

When I discovered Twitter, I was spending most of my online time on IRC. I remember that one of my first strong feelings about Twitter was that it felt a bit like an IRC channel which had all the people I cared about and only them in it. (I spent my first few days/weeks on Twitter frantically recruiting.) They didn’t all know each other, and didn’t realise they were rubbing shoulders in “my” room, but for me, it was really as if I had managed to invite everybody to my birthday party.

That’s the network.

Facebook entered my world, and the same thing happened. Life online became more and more about the network. And as the network grew (and grew and grew), all our time and attention poured into it. It’s great to have a place which is populated nearly only by people you know and care about. Facebook does that for you.

Who wants to hang out in blog comments when there is Facebook and Twitter?

As you can see, I’m thinking out loud in this rambly, slightly contradictory blog post. If you can synthesise all this better, definitely have a go at it (in the comments or on your blog — link back!) I can’t quite wrap my head around all this, I feel like I’m still missing a piece.

Back to newsletters.

What newsletters definitely have chance of bringing back is this feeling of small scale. When I write a blog post, like this one, I’m not writing it for a dedicated group of readers anymore. I know you’re still out there, of course, all three of you who actually follow my blog ;-), but I’m also very much aware that I am writing for a whole pile of strangers who will stumble her after a google search. I am writing for everyone.

Email can be very personal. It goes from private space to private space (the inbox). It definitely feels more personal to write than a blog post. But it’s funny, in a way, because this post is going to reach some of you by email, and newsletters are often archived publicly on the web. There shouldn’t be a difference, right?

But there is, because the medium or tool you use really changes the way you express yourself and connect. “Email first” or “web first” does not produce the same writing.

So let’s see what happens with this newsletter experiment, OK? Take your pick and subscribe to:

And seriously, I’m really looking forward to your comments on all the stuff I’ve talked about here.

The Frustrating Easiness of Sharing a Link on Facebook (and Twitter and Google Plus and Tumblr and…) [en]

[fr] C'est tellement facile de partager des liens sur Facebook et autres que je finis par ne plus le faire sur mon blog, parce que c'est laborieux. Il y a un moyen plus simple?

Today, when I stumble upon an interesting link, I share it on Facebook. And usually also on Twitter. And on Google Plus.

It’s easy. More often than not, I found the link in question on Facebook, Twitter, or G+. Resharing on the same platform is two clicks maximum. The link is expanded into an excerpt and a photo which are nice and pretty and often spare me having to write any kind of introduction to the link (I do, sometimes).

Sharing on other platforms? At the worst, copy-paste (goes quickly when you use keyboard shortcuts and know your way around your browser tabs). Or the bitly bookmarklet.

Sharing on social media is rewarding: people are there already, they comment, they like, they reshare.

I pull quotes out of what I’m reading with the Tumblr bookmarklet and post them to Digital Crumble. That in turn gets sucked into Facebook, to the annoyance of some and the delight of others. Super easy.

You know what’s not easy? Collecting a bunch of interesting links I’ve found recently into a blog post on Climb to the Stars. That sucks. I’ve done it at times, yes, but I do wish there was an easier way to do it than copy-pasting article titles and putting links on them, after having let them pile up in an Evernote note until there were enough of them.

I’m sure there is a way to do this more elegantly. Tell me!

Des entreprises qui utilisent bien les médias sociaux [fr]

[en] A round-up of some companies which use social media well. Follow the links... (Most of them are in English.)

La semaine dernière, à la conférence 200 Ideas (super, faut que je vous en parle, pas là, allez voir le site, il y a toutes les vidéos et les slides), je rencontre Christian, qui me pose une question très pertinente.

On est en mode “réseautage”, couleur “faut vraiment que je bosse sur mon pitch et je vais t’en faire la démo”.

Alors il me fait: “Médias sociaux. Hmm. Alors qui sont les entreprises qui utilisent bien les médias sociaux?” (je cite de mémoire).

Et moi: “.” (Comme dans les BDs Achille Talon.)

Suivi de “Euh… ouais, je devrais être capable de répondre à cette question, hein?”

Lui: “Oui…”

Bref. Je lui ai promis un e-mail, et en faisant un peu de recherche pour l’e-mail en question, je me suis dit que ça pouvait faire un billet de blog. Que voici.

Déjà, en préambule, disons que “bien utiliser les médias sociaux”, c’est vaste. On peut utiliser les médias sociaux pour beaucoup de choses (qui ont tendance à se mélanger, mais séparons quand même):

  • marketing
  • service client
  • communication
  • comm interne
  • PR
  • gestion de crise
  • veille stratégique
  • …

Tout ceci n’est pas forcément visible. Comment savoir si une boîte utilise super bien les médias sociaux pour leur communication interne? Ou ce qu’ils font côté veille? Et la stratégie? Je veux dire, comment réfléchissent-ils à ce qu’ils font? Dur de savoir tout ça sans accès insider.

Après, il y a les outils. Une boîte peut être géniale sur Twitter et catastrophique sur son blog. Ou bien utiliser Vine super bien mais pas Facebook.

Sans plus attendre, quelques exemples d’entreprises qui utilisent bien les médias sociaux. C’est pas exhaustif, c’est un peu en vrac, c’est même pas forcément les meilleurs (qui suis-je pour juger?), mais c’est un début. De quoi vous inspirer en tous cas! Suivez les liens…

Whole Foods

Le magasin bio américain (aussi surnommé par certains “Whole Paycheck”, parce que oui, c’est plus cher), se débrouille plutôt pas mal en matière de médias sociaux. Vous pouvez lire un case study sur slideshare, une interview avec leur “Interactive Art Director”, une petite analyse de leur utilisation de quelques gros réseaux, ou encore une brève présentation de leur utilisation de Twitter (où on parle aussi de Best Buy et Southwest). Ils ont un blog, “Whole Story”, bien sûr.

Best Buy

Champions du service client sur les médias sociaux.

Southwest

La compagnie d’aviation a un blog exemplaire, Nuts About Southwest. Voici un article sur 5 leçons marketing à tirer de leur présence médias sociaux.

CGN

Plus près de nous et à une autre échelle, j’aime bien ce que fait la CGN sur Facebook.

Blogs

Côté blogs, eh bien, il y a à lire! Quelques articles-listes pour démarrer:

Le blog d’entreprise (ou en entreprise) est loin d’être mort! Plongez dans ces listes, vous en ressortirez certainement quelque chose.

Old Spice

Leur campagne-réponses sur YouTube était mythique. Voici un case-study parmi des centaines d’autres.

La fête sur Twitter

Quand on est confortable avec l’outil et sa culture, ça peut donner ce genre de délire. Ça commence avec Tesco Mobile, ça continue avec Yorkshire Tea, et ça finit par inclure des dizaines d’autres marques.

Vine

Vous connaissez Vine? Oui, ça s’utilise en marketing.

Et encore?

Dans mes explorations, je tombe sur un article présentant 5 bons exemples d’utilisation de médias sociaux dans le “retail”. Google est notre amis à tous…

A part ça, il faut bien sûr mentionner Zappos et QoQa. Et LEGO! Il y a certainement d’autres boîtes incontournables qui font du bon boulot sur les médias sociaux… à vous de les présenter dans les commentaires!

 

 

IRC: #joiito Channel Revival (Or At Least Reunion) [en]

[fr] Le retour du canal IRC #joiito, et quelques pensées sur ce qui différencie Twitter et Facebook (même les groupes) d'un canal IRC comme celui-ci.

So, let me tell you what happened last night. You know I’ve been reading Here Comes Everybody, right? Well, in chapter 9, Clay Shirky tells the story of #joiito — Joi Ito‘s IRC channel, that I was a regular of for years since sometime in 2003 or 2004, until Twitter emptied the channel of most of its life. Reading about it in Clay’s book reminded me what a special thing it was.

Last night, I saw that my old friend Kevin Marks was online on Facebook. Unless I’m very mistaken, Kevin is one of the numerous friends I made on #joiito, and we hadn’t chatted in ages. I wanted to tell him about my Blogging Tribe experiment, see if he was interested. We started joking about the old times (OMG Technorati!), I mentioned my reading Here Comes Everybody, the mention of #joiito, he pointed me to his blog post clarifying Jeannie Cool’s role in the channel (seems Clay had got the story wrong in the first edition of his book), which brought me to another post of Kevin’s on the bots we had running in #joiito, and on an impulse, I went to check out the channel.

Now over the last years, I’ve pretty much always been logged in to #joiito (I run irssi in screen on my server). But I stopped going. Like many others it seems, over the years Twitter became my “replacement” for IRC. I guess we all logged in less and less, and the channel population and conversation dropped below the critical mass it needed to stay truly alive. The community disbanded.

The channel never truly died, of course. There were always some of us sitting in there, and there would be sudden flare-ups of activity. But the old spirit had left the room.

Kevin followed me in, started fiddling with the bots, I found an old abandoned #joiito Facebook group. Created back in 2007, it was clearly an “old-style” Facebook group (they sucked) that was migrated to new style and emptied automatically of its members. There were three members, I invited myself in, invited a bunch of other #joiito old hands, and started pinging people to get them to drop into the channel.

In less than an hour we had a lively conversation going on in #joiito. I stayed on for a few hours, then went to bed. Imagine my surprise when I woke up this morning to discover close to 60 people in the Facebook group, and that the conversation on #joiito had gone on all my night, with “new old channel regulars” joining! It feels just like the old days. Seriously. It makes me very happy, because I think this IRC channel was really something precious, and I was sad it was “no more”. (Quotes because obviously, the channel never disappeared… it just died down.)

I haven’t had an IRC conversation like this in years. I’ve been very active on Twitter (slightly less now), am very active on Facebook, and really love Facebook groups. But an IRC channel like #joiito is something different.

When I asked my old friends what had “replaced” #joiito in their current online ecosystem, the general response seems to be “Twitter”, clearly. But what is missing with Twitter and Facebook (and even Path) that we are so happy to see our channel alive again?

Twitter and Facebook are centred on the network, not on the group. We are loosely joined to each other on Twitter just like we are loosely joined on IRC (I definitely am not “close” to all the channel regulars — more on that too in a bit), but the container is way bigger. On Twitter, our networks sprawl and spread until we end up (some of us) with thousands of followers. This is very different than an enclosed chatroom with less than 100 people in it.

Once we started spending more time on Twitter and Facebook, we stopped being part of the same group. We got lost in our own networks of friends, acquaintances, and contacts.

Facebook groups bring back this “community” aspect. But interaction and conversation in Facebook groups, which are built upon a message-board model, is much slower than in IRC. There is less fluff, less joking, less playing around. It’s not real-time chatting, it’s endless commenting. We’ve touted Twitter and Facebook so much as being “real-time” that we’ve forgotten where the real “real-time” is: in chatting.

IM, Facebook, and Twitter allow people to keep in touch. I’m connected to a large handful of #joiito regulars on Facebook — people I used to exchange with daily during the Golden Days. But on Facebook, we don’t talk. Our relationship is not one of one-to-one chats. Our lives on Facebook our different enough that they don’t bring us closer, but make us drift apart. We are missing our hang-out place.

You’ve seen that play out offline, certainly. You leave a club you were part of or a job. There are many people there whom you appreciate or even love, but you do not stay in touch. Once the common activity or place that brought you together in the first place is gone, there is not enough left to keep you together.

Twitter and Facebook are more lonely places to hang out online than an IRC channel, because nobody shares the same experience as you. We all have a different Twitter, a different Facebook. In an IRC channel, we all have the same lines of text scrolling before our eyes.

Is this just a reunion, or is this the revival of the #joiito IRC channel?

Only time will tell. I personally hope for a revival. I missed you guys.

Anil Dash Writes About The Web We Lost [en]

[fr] Le web qu'on a perdu. Nostalgie.

Yes, there are people who have been blogging for longer than me. Quite a few of them, actually. Anil Dash is one. You should read him.

His most recent article (found thanks to danah, who has also been blogging for longer than me, and whom you should also read) is titled The Web We Lost. It hits right on the nostalgia that has been creeping up on me these last years, expressed for example in A Story About Tags, and Technorati, and Tags or Ye Olde-School Blogs Are Still Around.

Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr and Pinterest are all great, but they tend to suck us in, and I feel we are all collectively high on real-time content and interaction. I miss the slower days. I miss the sense of “community” I felt with other bloggers in the old days, as I mention in the wrap-up post to my “Back to Blogging” challenge. I feel that on Twitter and Facebook community has been replaced with network. Networking is great. I love spending time with my network. But it’s not the same thing.

Most of all, the timeline we now live in is made up of transient content. It’s there and gone. It’s the world of orality, of the spoken word which evaporates once pronounced, even though we are typing. We are going back to an oral tradition. Blogs and wikis, however, are still part of the written tradition. We are losing searchability. We are also using content portability due to the lack of RSS feeds on certain platforms, and increasingly restrictive API access. APIs seem to be the promise for more holes in our buckets, but they seem more and more to be a way to control tightly what happens to the content locked in a given platform.

That’s sad. That’s not the way I hoped things would go.

There is more. Go and read Anil’s piece. And leave a comment there through Facebook.

Personal, Social, and the Shortcuts [en]

[fr] Je me demande si toutes ces fonctionnalités pour nous "simplifier la vie" dans notre utilisation "sociale" des outils ne vide pas partiellement ceux-ci de leur "socialité".

Yesterday, as I was gathering the links to the posts of the other #back2blog challengers (bloody hard work if you ask me), I remembered that I had left a comment on one of Delphine‘s posts.

I’ve been leaving quite a few comments on blog posts since the challenge started. Often, with “modern” blogging tools, you can check a little box to receive an e-mail alert when somebody responds to your comment. (Not on this blog. I run WordPress, but my server doesn’t send e-mail.)

It’s nice, because it relieves us of having to remember that we left a comment, and if conversation erupts (reward!) we will be informed.

Having to remember I had left a comment at Delphine’s reminded me of the time before RSS readers were popular, before coComment, before Facebook Connect, before WordPress even. Everything was much more “manual”. And with that, I believe, more personal. Part of what goes in to create a relationship is time, and effort. Time to find that blog post. Effort to remember.

Now, JP is arguing (and I’m with him here) that when you try and scale personal, you get social.

I am wondering, though, what it is that you do lose on the way, if you scale far enough.

Mass-everything did not come up from nowhere. As I learned the hard way while promoting Going Solo, shortcuts have a price. Send an e-mail copied to 100 people, or send 100 personal e-mails, and you won’t have the same efficiency. That’s why Americans take the trouble to make house calls or phone up people to convince them to vote.

And while I immensely appreciate all the features of modern social media which make it so much more easy for us to be social, I’m starting to think that some of what I find distasteful with some uses of social media is not just those who are stuck on the other side of what I think of as the “Cluetrain paradigm shift”, but maybe also what happens when we wind up taking too many shortcuts to make it “easier to be social”.

Are we headed for a form of “mass social media”? Are we already there, sadly, for some part?

Even if this is true, that does not mean that we have to give up on the “true” social, or even “personal”.

I remember a few years ago one of my friends (Suw if I’m not mistaken) saying that she didn’t get why so many people were complaining that “Twitter wasn’t what it was”.

On Twitter, one has complete control over who one follows. You don’t have to go and follow all the new-styled social media gurus. Or the annoying self-promoting people. You can stick to those who rock your world, and have a Twitter experience that doesn’t change so much over time. (Of course the people you follow change, but that’s another thing.)

You can use Twitter like mass media, or you can use Twitter like social media, or like personal media. The choice is yours.

#back2blog challenge (9/10)

Pêle-mêle de début juillet [fr]

[en] A bunch of random stuff.

Je n’arrive pour le moment pas à m’organiser pour prendre le temps de bloquer “correctement”. Je vous fais du coup le coup (!) de l’article “nouvelles en vrac”. Old-style.

Quintus au balcon sur fond de tomates

C’est le moment d’acheter votre billet pour la conférence Lift à Genève les 6-7-8 février 2013, avant que le prix ne prenne l’ascenseur. Lift, c’est à ne pas manquer. (Si vous avez participé à une édition précédente de Lift, vous avez reçu un code pour le prix “super early bird” de 625 CHF, valable encore un jour ou deux! Ne laissez pas passer le délai!)

C’est aussi le moment, si le coworking est quelque chose qui vous parle, de prendre votre billet pour Coworking Europe, qui aura lieu cette année à Paris les 8-9-10 novembre. Je suis à l’affiche d’un des panels du premier jour.

La Muse ouvre les portes de son espace lausannois, avec pique-nique tous les mardis.

Toujours au chapitre coworking, il y a de la place à l’eclau, tant pour des indépendants/freelance que des startups. Venez visiter!

J’ai pris part pour la première fois à En ligne directe, émission de la RTS qui démarre la veille au soir par un débat sur Twitter (hashtag #EnLD), repris dans le direct du matin avec des invités. Je trouve le concept génial. Le sujet du soir où je suis restée pendue à Twitter (plus que d’habitude) était “faut-il interdire/punir le téléchargement illégal“. Vous imaginez la suite. Pirater n’est pas voler, c’est toujours valable en 2012. Je suis effarée par la mauvaise foi et/ou le lavage de cerveau dont font preuve les “opposants”. Croire que le monde dans lequel on évolue (physique, numérique) et ses caractéristiques ontologiques n’est qu’un point de détail pour débattre d’éthique ou d’économie, qu’économie de rareté vs. économie d’abondance ne change rien à la morale, c’est faire preuve d’une naïveté et d’une simplicité de réflexion affligeante. Le tout repris par Magali Philip dans un Storify magistral.

Le Port de Vidy fait très fort avec ses nouvelles portes high-tech sécurisées.

Un chouette Bloggy Friday a eu lieu en juillet, après celui de juin. Les gens d’internet qui se rencontrent offline, il paraît que c’est le truc nouveau super-tendance de l’été. (Les rencontres IRC d’il y a 15 ans ça compte pas, hein. Ni les rencontres blogueurs, pendant qu’on y est. Ni les rencontres Twitter qui existent depuis des années.) Quelqu’un se lance pour faire l’hôte ou l’hôtesse pour le mois d’août? Ce sera durant ma semaine de déconnexion.

Hercule Poirot cherche toujours un nouveau foyer en Angleterre. Quintus, lui, s’installe bien en Suisse et explique au jeune Tounsi comment respecter ses aînés avec pedigree.

Les plantes sur mon balcon et dans mon appart poussent bien. J’ai des piles de photos, à mettre en ligne et à commenter ici pour vous. En attendant, il y a un groupe Facebook “Petites plantes de balcon et d’ailleurs“, si c’est votre genre.

Ah oui, c’est aussi le moment de vous inscrire pour la troisième session menant au diplôme SAWI de Spécialiste en médias sociaux et communautés en ligne. Dernière séance d’info le 21 août.

Et aussi le moment de postuler (jusqu’au 16 juillet!) si vous pensez être la personne qu’il faut pour prendre la tête du SAWI en Suisse romande. Et je suis toujours ouverte à des candidatures de blogueurs motivés pour le blog de voyage ebookers.ch.

Côté boulot, je suis pas mal bookée, mais j’ai encore de la place pour un mandat long terme de “blogueuse en chef” (ou “redactrice en chef de blog”, si vous préférez).

Inspiration, sur Kickstarter: Bridegroom et Amanda Palmer.

Google aménage ses cafétérias pour encourager ses employés à manger plus sainement. Fascinant.

La plaie des infographies.

Pourquoi les femmes ne peuvent (toujours pas) tout avoir.

Passer du temps à ne rien faire, pour mieux faire.

Et pour finir: l’été de mon chat. (Non, pas le mien, celui du journaliste du Temps.)