I just finished reading Keith Burtis’ great guest post on Chris Brogan’s blog, “Twitter- To Converse or to Broadcast-THAT is the Question.” As I scrolled and skimmed through the comments to get down to the bottom and add my own comment, it dawned on me how strange it is that the participatory medium of blogs that are all about conversation and collaboration do not allow people to comment on comments.
Sure, you can explicitly refer to what commenter “Starfish” said when you, yourself, are commenting, but this requires others to scroll back up and try to find “Starfish’s” comment, then scroll back down to your comment and then down again to insert their own comment. This is cumbersome, not collaborative.
I often find the same challenge in using Twitter: I @reply to someone’s tweet to start or continue a conversation, but maybe I’ve been in meetings for the past two hours and the tweet that I’m latching on to is a tweet from much earlier that day. I feel the need to sort of recap the initial tweet and then add my insight or addition–tough in 140 characters. From being on the other side of some of @replies I know it’s sometimes difficult to to figure out to which tweetstream they’re referring.
As I commented–yes, linearly, because what other choice did I have?–on Keith’s post, the broadcast problem is threefold. First, we Digital Immigrants, are still getting our sea legs when it comes to participatory media. Collaboration is not our comfort zone. We want try out the latest social networking tool, but find it uncomfortable to put ourselves out there, trust “strangers,” and give away our ideas for free. It’s a cultural issue.
The second issue is the adoption continuum. Remember 1994 when email was still fairly new? Little by little friends and family members were “getting on email,” as we said back in the day. The user habit was to write an email letter–yep, these were long messages–to your friend. Then once you’d gone back and forth a few times and had nothing else to say, the “forwards” would start. From jokes, to consumer warnings, to limericks, you were one recipient on your friend’s mass distribution list. At first this was funny and you, too, would forward these inane messages along to your friends who were “on email.” But “funny” quickly soured and turned into annoying. You moved on. You started using email as a productive communication tool rather than as a toy. It became a seamless part of your daily communications.
The same adoption continuum exists for social media. First we sign up for a service and then probably forget about it for awhile. Then we passively observe the landscape. Next we dip our toes in and blurt and broadcast, “I had pizza for lunch!” Then we settle in and start sharing useful and mildly interesting information with our followers…but we’re still operating in a 1.0 broadcast paradigm. As we build our follower networks, we begin to see the value of social media. Suddenly we “get it”: we have this mindshift that it’s not about us, it’s about them. Broadcast is about increasing value for the creator; social media is about increasing value for everyone else.
The third and final piece of the broadcast problem is that the blog and microblog platform infrastructures are, too, still evolving and are not yet truly conducive to the collaboration that their content is trying to encourage. I’d be interested in hearing if anyone knows of a blogging platform that truly facilitates collaborative discussions. I can envision a clickable mindmapping kind of visualization.
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Nice post. Though you can reply to comments on the Techcrunch blog, and the Disqus commenting platform also allows for threaded comments (and sends notifications to users when there have been additional comments on blogs or to their comment). Actually, that’s my biggest pet peeve about generating conversation online. Very few outlets enable notifications that the conversation is continuing. I’m not going to bookmark every instance where I may have commented and revisit them all on the chance that there may be additional comments. Disqus (among other services as well) moves the online experience in that direction.
One of the most poignant memes I glommed on to recently was a statement by Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody. He states – and I’m paraphrasing here – that technology only becomes useful when it becomes boring. In other words, in the early adopter phases, when everyone is “geeking” over the software, it’s used for anything but productivity. When the novelty wears off, then the long-range (typically productive in some measure) effects set in.
Mark,
Wow, I actually just learned about Disqus today and have signed up! Good suggestion. Thanks for commenting/conversing. 😉
Adam, thanks for sharing Clay Shirky’s concept. This leaves me wondering if there really is any benefit in being an early adopter…it’s expensive (time & toy $) and being in the early adopter tail (3rd standard deviation) may not really get you much further than being within two standard deviations.
Agreed re: early adopter ROI, but someone’s got to do it, right? 🙂 Seriously, though, there has to be an early user/test group that evaluates the capabilities of the system and then gives the thumbs up or down to their cohorts. Otherwise, how would mid- and late-adoption ever occur? But it can be frustrating.
I equate it to developing the “skimming” skill required to keep up with dozens of RSS feeds. When I read through my feeds, I quickly scan the titles and have trained myself to only delve into those that seem to be particularly relevant.
Similarly, when I come across a new web service (typically via a blog!), I devote 5-10 minutes to checking it out. If I don’t “get it” by then, it’s probably not for me. If I do get it, I immediately tag it in delicious, tweet it, blog about it, etc. I may or may not end up using the service regularly, but I put it in my bag of tricks and pass the word – who knows? It might be the perfect service someone else has been looking for.
Adam, yep, you’ve got exactly the right “give more than you take” attitude towards social media. That mindshift from “what can I get out of it that will give me an edge over others” to “what I can share with others so that we can all learn and discover together” is a sign of someone who’s gotten over the hump of the social media learning curve.
Thanks so much for chatting here. I like your idea about only giving a new service 5-10 minutes and then moving on. I am constantly challenged by the time-sink of social media. Thanks for the good tip.
I met both the Disqus and CoComment guys at BWE08, and though I do a lot of commenting during and after work, I still haven’t really checked out either of their products! I bet it would make my life a lot easier, but I’m afraid of it taking more than 5-10 minutes to figure it out (good recommendation, Adam). I’m also afraid there’s an even better tool out there and how do I research that?
Guess I should just dive in 🙂
Hello!
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PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language 😉
See you!
Your, Raiul Baztepo
Interesting points! I was actually thinking about this topic last night and this morning (particularly how to incorporate it into my own blog). Thanks for the tips, bro!