Thanks for your response and your questions, John. You said:
So can someone explain to me the advantage or unique quality of blogs as opposed to newsgroups. I frankly see no difference and don't understand the enthusiasm for blogs.
There are a lot of people who are in the same boat.
I'm not sure that I would categorize a blog as a community building tool, per se, though I think it can be a part of the toolkit that attracts a community. Unlike a threaded discussion board (like this one on TechSoup), a blog is not the best format for discussion. Typically comments on a post are not threaded and the are simple a long string connect, not to each other, but to the original post.
Typically a blog is characterized by:
- a link with some explanatory, frequently refered to as a post
- a way to link directly the the post
- reverse chronological order of the information presentation
- very simple commenting functionality
In this line of thinking, the unit of currency in a blog is the post. And the value in the post is often the link and the comment about the link. That is, of course, a very general statement and more or less true on various weblogs.
I think of community discussion areas as containing the following characteristics:
- topic -- manifest in either the subject line of an email or the name of a topic. To use a TechSoup example, you can see all the conversation topics in the hardware forum.
- threading -- my email program, for example, lets me group conversations so that I can see who was responding to which email. Often in community boards this shows up as nested comments. You can view TechSoup this way -- when you are looking at the various topics in a forum, change the drop down next to "View by" to "Thread." Now I can follow the conversation, the chain of responses, easily.
With this description in mind, I think of the unit of currency in discussion areas as the conversation. That's why I'm there.
I'm not trying to make this either/or. As you said, methods are mixed. And tools are developing which make them more and more mixed. And people expand the use tools past their original purpose.
*
As user, I turn to blogs and community discussion areas for vastly different reasons. I turn to blogs to get the perspective of the author(s): this manifests in the links they choose, their reading of the links, and the other posts. It's like I have a whole series of clipping services out there pulling together information from all over the Internet. In essence, I turn to them for various kinds of news -- often topic specific news.
I turn to community discussion areas for conversation. I want feedback on an idea, I want to engage with a group of people around a specific topic. But it's that engagement I'm looking for.
I guess what I'm saying is that with blogs I feel like I'm engaging with information and in community discussion areas I feel like I'm engaging with people.
As I reread that, it feels far to cut-and-dried but I can't quite come up with a better way to describe it.
Again, thanks for your post. This helped push me to think about why and how I use blogs in a deeper way.
-webb.
*To get very geeky for a moment: I use a social bookmark tool called
del.icio.us. Essentially, it's a simple way for me to keep my bookmarks, tag them with keywords, and share them with other people. This is all set up as a way to grab and keep links. However, people have started using it for
conversations. The key is: you only get to talk once.