11–20 of 36 posts
Aren't social networks just sort of like... blog networks?
Oh goody. Maybe it will spell the end of the "you should follow me on Twitter" imperative at the end of every blog post on every blog everywhere.
Maybe then we can stop throwing piles of money at people who want to build walled gardens and go back in the direction of people hosting their own content for others to peruse.
(Yes, I'm predicting the failure of Google+ as well as Facebook and all the other me-too services like mass photoblogging services and all that other crap.)
We've spent too much time and effort writing code to help people push their content into companies that will claim the right to own it. Let's make tools that help people express themselves in ways that benefit everyone and that ensure creators retain ownership of the work they create.
A blog is a great way to meet people with similar interests, which is the purported reason for social networks. Nothing wrong with people using social networks but for people who can manage their own site, that just seems like a better way to invest energy creating content.
In blogging you're talking about a very large number of individuals, most of whom are not likely going to be good at ad sales / management / placement. The blogging ecosystem is inherently chaotic, it'd be like herding cats trying to get blog based advertising up to the effectiveness of a singular organization of massive scale like Facebook.
Then you have a huge portion of the blogging world that is made up of corporate blogs, non-profit blogs, and so on and many of those simply will never have any interest in ad monetization.
To correct the imbalance would require a very large and efficient ad machine at the core of the blogging world, with the ability to determine placement and ad matching for every blog - that doesn't exist and never will. Slapping AdSense on a blog won't cut it (not to mention most blogs don't run any serious advertising and never will).
Any move towards a decentralized system that is harder to track and spy on would have my support.
IMO popular mainstream consumption, and being difficult to track/spy, are at odds. If everybody and their brother reads what you write, I can't think of any way it could simultaneously be difficult for the Feds to follow it too.
Oh goody. Maybe it will spell the end of the "you should follow me on Twitter" imperative at the end of every blog post on every blog everywhere.
I sure hope so. Nothing shouts "I don't understand A/B testing so I'll just use Dustin Curtis' result" louder than that sign-off.