It's Rishi

I was composing an e-mail reply to someone (the person reading this will know who he is) and what I intended to be a short e-mail on the topic of conversation in the blogosphere ended up sprouting into this long rambling. I realized that I wanted to throw it on my blog for viewing by anyone who might find it interesting:

On any given Monday morning, thousands of people gather around water coolers at offices around the country to chat about the “Desperate Housewives” episode that aired the night before. On a daily basis, radio shows around the country host discussions covering the same events in news and politics. In these examples, because of physical limitations, the number of people that can engage in any one of these conversations is limited. That’s why many people flock to the Internet to discuss these same topics with a broader scope of people. Ultimately, the “perfect” conversation is when everyone interested in a topic, can engage in a single, dynamic conversation. It is often the case, however, that in the blogosphere, at any given moment in time, many blogs will be covering the exact same topic. The result is that there are many, duplicate conversations going on – just like what happens in the offline-world, as I described above.

A new service that made some commotion over the weekend, coComment, helps to facilitate conversation on a single blog. Also, services like Memeorandum help connect blog posts by finding memes thru back-links and track-backs. While services like these help to connect opinions, the problem is far from solved. Person a who comments on blog A may be stimulated by a comment from person b on blog B, but the two people are likely to never read each other’s thoughts.

As we all know, blogs compete for attention. More specifically, each conversation is competing for attention from other conversations about the same item. Every blogger would rather have a comment posted on his blog, and see his own comment thread grow, rather than that happen on another blog.

The blogosphere isn’t the only form of discussion on the Web. Far from it actually. There are many other discussion environments, most which are centralized. The best example of centralization are message boards (and if you think message boards are on the decline, do yourself a favor and check out some stats at Big Boards) where the entire conversation (both people and content) is centralized.

Message board culture is very different from blogosphere culture. People who visit and post in message boards do so because they like to be part of a community and for the entertainment value that is had by engaging in intelligent conversation about things of interest to that person. The blogosphere, which is sort of the opposite of message boards in the sense that people and content are decentralized, has a somewhat different culture. For many bloggers, their online identity is their blog (and the content that they publish on it). Most bloggers blog for the purpose of promotion of their identity – whether it’s their social identity or professional identity. The key advantage of a blog, in terms of building an indentity, is the very fact that all the content a blogger writes is explicitly connected to his blog, and thus his identity. This is not to say that bloggers don’t care about intelligent conversation, it’s just that bloggers have this additional motive of building identity.

By building our identity, we can increase the attention that we garner from our peers, and thus increase our value amongst our peers. This is true in both the message board case and the blogosphere case, except that in the former, the community of peers is small and isolated so building identity in this case has, in a sense, limited and finite value.

So the big question is, does blogger greed inhibit the unifying of conversation? Are bloggers so hung up on building attention that they’d rather own their conversations instead of joining their conversations together for the benefit to those involved in the conversation?

Anyways, I’m not sure I brought my points together as well as I wanted but it’s 5AM and I need to sleep. But I’m really hoping you read this post and tell me your thoughts.