Yes, as any interaction designer, I’m interested in Web 2.0-type things but I’m also interested in seeing how web 2.0 endeavors are scaling, accumulating and their “long tail” as it were.
It used to be (and is still the case) you’d read/listen/watch something interesting, well, you’d put it in your bookmarks, you’d send the link to a friend or you’d email it to a group of friends (yuck). Nowadays, there’s a million ways to make a virtual gesture saying that you appreciate content:
you can bookmark it of course but that certainly isn’t exciting, you link to it, you comment, you subscribe to it, you add it to your del.icio.us list, to magnolia, to kinja, you digg it, you ping technorati, bloglines, blogpulse, and god knows what else… For 4 lines of text that someone will have written in a blog I found these 21 ways to say “i love you”.
Now let us consider a more humble blog like my own. Well by the aforementioned standards I would be considered as not doing enough self-promotion. But what if i really like that, to stay an under-advertised blogger with a readership of maybe less than 10? . On the edge, looking in. Maybe I’ve actually got more chances of being read and of having people engage with my blog as a body of thought (well rants) more than for its individual posts… like tending a garden, I blog for my own professional and sometimes personal benefit and I am not particularly interested in becoming paranoid about visualizing how much people love what I write. I have had very engaging offline conversations with some of my readers and that right now is the best reward. But as i look into this love parade, what will it do in the future when everyone has access to these popularity measures… will they mean anything anymore? or will they lose value because after a while 20 blogs with 6 700 diggs is still too many blogs for me to read through…right now there is no corrolation between what is good or bad, it depends on whether you are using the right promotional tools, regardless of the content… does that sound familiar? I mean isn’t this the situation with traditional marketing and media? Is that all we’re doing then? reproducing old models virtually? yes the scale is different, a blog is completely different to an oil company, but it’s all a matter of exposure isn’t it? Who will get the most out of a reader’s attention… who will be loved the most…
I was just reading something in “Reinventing Comics” where people were worried about the portal sites and whether they would squeeze out all the other sites they didn’t link to. I think the great thing about the Internet is that it is able to correct imbalances rather quickly compared to entities in the real-world…part of this is may be an age thing, I think, as the internet is still young. But it’s also the frictionless environment that it affords us.
There was a time when Yahoo was the internet, just as AOL, but as search improved there were other options. So maybe as things get more regimented and people look at the same sources all the time, there’ll be an opportunity for someone else to randomize things, kinda like the Flickr photo of the day. The reality is that you can “digg” any site, but some are making it easier to do so than others.
Hey Alexandra.
I was looking around the net for “A thousand ways to say I love you” and for some reason Uncle google directed me to your blog.
I had a look at your picture and felt a strong urge to write to you. I can’t really say why.
The reason I called uncle google is that I have fallen in love with this lady that don’t want me. Am I alone, NO.
May you succed in your career and and in life.
Love from Karl