Transforming Blogs Into Conversations: Scoble, Silverlight and FriendFeed

A good blog post is in essence a question; purposefully opinionated, or better yet, outright wrong. It demands interaction.

The blogger's job is to provide the question, provoke debate, and invite the community at large to pool its immense knowledge and take the conversation further (a characteristic which distinguishes the blogger from the journalist). The conversation is the reason why we prefer blogs. If it weren't for the dialog between writer and reader, we may as well just pick up a newspaper or listen to the damn radio.

This is how it was always supposed to be. But typically, either this conversation does not really happen at all, or else it is so slow and disjointed as to suck the life out of the whole process. Blogging platforms and the blogosphere as a whole have failed miserably at enabling effective conversation.

But it would appear that the landscape changing, and that the evolution of conversation is changing the nature of blogging itself. To demonstrate this, we look at a particular, regular post by Robert Scoble, and look at how the conversation now shifts from one forum to another (and more importantly, why). This will demonstrate how the blogosphere is becoming less about the blog, and more about the conversation.

This trend has wide-ranging implications, and points the way for future web communication, both in the blogosphere and beyond.

This tale doesn't really begin anywhere, but we'll start with a post on Scobleizer.com, as it's an appropriate place to jump in.

Now Scoble, uber-blogger, is more-or-less a Microsoft fan, and indeed he worked there for a considerable period. When the news broke the other day that Google is now capable of indexing Flash content — so rewriting the SEO textbook, for starters — this is how he headlined his post on the matter:

Adobe Flash Gets a Break in Silverlight War

Quoth Scoble: 'Don’t miss this news. It’s significant because Google’s search engine can decide the marketplace winner between Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight. You think Google (or Yahoo, for that matter) is going to be very motivated to index Silverlight content? Rrrriiiiigggghhhhttttt.'

Furthermore: 'Also notice which search engine isn’t playing the Adobe game: Microsoft’s.

Silverlight might be better technology, but if it doesn’t get indexed by the two biggest search engines it’s game over.

Now you might get some insight into why Microsoft wanted to pay US$ 46 billion to buy Yahoo. Like Ballmer said “Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers!”

It's a somewhat tangential post, in that this momentous news, something of a search engine Holy Grail for a decade and more, is presented in the context of a mere plugin battle. Google indexing Flash is headline news, in and of itself. We could go on for hours about the implications of this for content creators and managers, but we won't. Not here, at least.

Conversely, we could talk for days about Flash vs. Silverlight, the implications and real-politik at Microsoft, the angle of Scoble's post, etc, etc. But we don't. Because what we are looking at here is the conversation, and now we switch abruptly to the venue where discussion on this post took place.

You Mean it Wasn't on Scobleizer.com?

This was not, as you might expect, on Scoble's comments board. There were plenty of good comments on Scobleizer.com on this. But the real action took place at another venue entirely: FriendFeed.com.

This is not a trivial development.

A Brief Pause - Checking Out FriendFeed

FriendFeed.com is a social aggregator, designed to collect all of your social activity in one place. You tell them where your Del.icio.us profile page is at, your Twitter profile, your blog URL and YouTube account page etc., etc. Every time you update any of these your feed gets updated. And you can subscribe to other people's feeds. Better yet, you can post messages to the stream a la Twitter, and comment on other people's activity and messages.

At it's heart, it's a conversational tool, streaming a never-ending discusion about technology matters, life, love, and so on.

One concrete benefit of this for bloggers is that you can actually see what pages Michael Arrington or Duncan Riley or someone is bookmarking on Delicious, for instance. And you get immediate notification of a new post, and so on. So it's great for bloggers, which is by-the-by.

Transforming Blogs Into Conversations: Scoble, Silverlight and FriendFeed

A good blog post is in essence a question; purposefully opinionated, or better yet, outright wrong. It demands interaction.\n\nThe blogger's job is to provide the question, provoke debate, and invite the community at large to pool its immense knowledge and take the conversation further (a characteristic which distinguishes the blogger from the journalist). The conversation is the reason why we prefer blogs. If it weren't for the dialog between writer and reader, we may as well just pick up a newspaper or listen to the damn radio.\n\nThis is how it was always supposed to be. But typically, either this conversation does not really happen at all, or else it is so slow and disjointed as to suck the life out of the whole process. Blogging platforms and the blogosphere as a whole have failed miserably at enabling effective conversation.\n\nBut it would appear that the landscape changing, and that the evolution of conversation is changing the nature of blogging itself. To demonstrate this, we look at a particular, regular post by Robert Scoble, and look at how the conversation now shifts from one forum to another (and more importantly, why). This will demonstrate how the blogosphere is becoming less about the blog, and more about the conversation. \n\nThis trend has wide-ranging implications, and points the way for future web communication, both in the blogosphere and beyond.\n

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