Today I felt the urge to blog again. If you write a blog I’m sure you know the feeling when you just need to let the world know what’s up. This is a feeling which I haven’t felt in a while now. This does not mean that I’ve been keeping quiet, but rather that there has been other outlets keeping me busy.
Jaiku is the main channel I use to broadcast my thoughts and feelings although I do use increasingly a few others as well.
This behavior is something I have been hearing and reading from others as well, but even more than that I have felt it as my friends are not posting as much as they used to. Most of them have migrated to Jaiku, Twitter, FriendFeed and the likes.
Out of these micro-blogging services (some prefer to call them activity feeds depending on what they see as the services’ primary function) Twitter is by far the most used internationally, whereas many Finns still prefer Jaiku, including me(!).
I’m not one bit surprised by this move from blogging to micro-blogging, as the latter has a much lower threshold to let the world know what’s up: I feel pressured to come up with something earth shaking and profound in my blog posts whereas Jaiku let’s me share an instant feeling I have, a news snippet I heard or let my friends know what, where, how and with whom I spending my day with. And more importantly not feel one bit bad about it even if only thing I have to say is ‘Zipping Espresso and enjoying the lazy afternoon’.
Not only does this give me a way to have a far reaching view into to world of the community of people I use these services with as I see their respective postings throughout the day, but it also satisfies my urge to express myself the way I did before via my blog. And now I don’t have to draft and redraft my doodlings and feel bad losing out to The Economist in insight and grammar.
More interestingly, not only are we seeing a change in the blogging remit (Not all the blogging is decreasing though. If your blog concentrates on news, professional advice, etc. you are seeing more and more competition and variety as more people feel comfortable venturing outside the local daily WWW pages) but the more profound change, I believe, is still waiting to happen.
When you use these micro-blogging services you can not only post about how you feel, think, etc. but you can answer when you see someone else posting. More importantly these conversations can occur in close to real-time. You can cut through all the other conversations in the global cloud of postings of thousand and thousands of people (soon millions) by addressing the person you desire to address by starting your message with @username.
So in effect, you can enjoy a stream of postings from all the people you decide to follow, including companies, news services and other similar entities, let them know how you feel in one-to-many manner and still have one-to-one conversations with the ones you choose to engage with. Again, all in real-time! Oh, and to top it all you can do a keyword Search or ask a question from what is a massive pool of people with almost always-on laptops and mobile phones giving you 9 out of 10 times several close-to-correct answers and reasoning to back them up.
Now, when you think about this, it starts to sound an awful lot like what I’m doing with Skype/Gmail chat, MSN Messenger, RSS feeds, Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube and Google Search all combined. And soon I could have all this in my mobile phone in one service, with a web-like download speeds and decent pricing. I admit there are two sides to the service: One is aggregation of for example my photos I take that now go to Flickr and then there is the purely conversational aspect like one-to-one chat.
Yet, I believe that as long as the number of feed subscriptions we bring to these conversations from all over the web do not suffocate the one-to-one conversations, they can live nicely together only re-enforcing the conversations and bringing in new talking points (or social objects if you will). Either way, choose any political system, educational institution or business and pick up a piece of paper to mind map your thoughts on it for 10 minutes on what possibilities the reasoning I outlined above might entail and you’re bound to put the pen down in awe and excitement. I think we’re soon seeing much bigger chances than a slight decrease in frequency of personal blogging.
See you in Jaiku!
Edit: The main point is not Twitter or some other micro-blogging service in itself, but the market that can now gradually evolve around an open platform. This is possible because of the open API, XMPP as a standard and the push model to distribute the user data that for example Twitter is gradually supporting. Thus, it will no longer be up to the respective service itself (Twitter in this case) in terms of what is possible to do with the data, but more up to our imagination. Twitter is one good, timely and very important example, but I believe only the tip of the iceberg on where we’re heading. This is THE big possibility that is starting to take shape, so get your thinking on.
