Community: The New Info Overload

I've read a couple pieces lately about a new form of information overload: online communities. Apparently we're all so busy with Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed that we're abandoning blogs (or so says this piece on TechCrunch). Soon, it would seem, all we'll have time for is Twitter feeds.

This is a nice little irony for those of us old enough to remember the original "information overload." This was back in the days of Web 1.0, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and it was a serious problem that a whole bunch of news feeds and websites were pushing data at us all the time, far faster than we could consume it. It was literally "push" back in those days; I remember a fairly popular screen saver that would display news and information headlines when your computer was inactive.

(Which, by the way, in hindsight looks like the stupidest publishing plan of all time. Great, display time-sensitive information on a subscriber's computer at the precise moment when you know s/he's not using it. That will work for sure. You can then use the proceeds to fund a door-to-door sales operation that caters exclusively to customers who aren't home.)

So where's the irony? For many of us, Web 1.0-style information overload was mitigated by ... blogs. Blogs covering niche topics have become some of the most effective information aggregators out there. I know I don't need to read the sports section, because I read blogs written by people who read it for me. I don't need to follow political news, because (again) I have a trusted blog whose authors consume that information, break it down, and spit it out for me in easily-digestible nuggets. So the notion that blogs themselves will be overcome by the sheer weight of ambient information being pushed out by Twitter, Facebook, and innumberable cell phone applications is curious, since that's exactly the problem that helped make blogs popular in the first place.

It also poses a question: what is the information digest of the future? Because we're certainly not going to be content with information overload, any more than we were the first time around. If blogs die because we no longer have time to read them, what will take their place? It certainly won't be that super-randomizer known as Twitter. It might, though, be an ambient information aggregator that digests Twitter feeds and news and commentary and sports scores and ... who knows, maybe even blog posts ... and spits all that out in an easier format to take in.

Crack that nut and you've got one hell of a service. But I don't know. For now I'm sticking with my blogs.

When the Blog Becomes the Community

News this morning that Movable Type has released updates to its free and Pro products. The pro version has an interesting feature: it enables "social blogging."

I've seen this principle in action already: it's been up and running for a while now on SB Nation, which hosts one of my favorite baseball blogs, Lookout Landing. The feature, in essence, is this: readers of a blog can (within certain limitations) blog themselves within the environment of the larger blog. Got that? It's easier to understand when you see it than when you read about it. In a nutshell, I can go to Lookout Landing and read the main blog there, which occupies central space, but as a registered user I can also create a "Fanpost" which is, in essence, a mini-blog within the blog. Others can read and post comments to my Fanpost, or they can create their own posts with comment threads attached. Social blogging takes the one-writer-many-readers model of most blog platforms and modifies it into one-primary-writer-many-readers-who-occasionally-write.

It's a very useful feature, and it has the potential to greatly expand the vitality of the community around a blog. I know from personal experience that, if I visit Lookout Landing and there is no new post in the main content well, I'll often browse through the Fanposts to see what's cooking over there. Frequently the author of Lookout Landing comments on Fanposts; sometimes he even creates Fanposts if the material isn't enough to merit an entire blog post. From a traditional baseball blog, Lookout Landing has evolved into an active community, and to a large extent because of that one feature.

Of course, if you're already struggling with the task of moderating the comments to your blog, the last thing you want is to worry about moderating the comments to all the posts your users might make (let alone the posts themselves). However, it's a feature that probably adds enough value to make it worthwhile. Social blogging makes a blog that much more interactive, which should make it a lot more sticky.