A couple of weeks ago I heard a comment on a podcast where someone defined blogs as conversations. At the time I didn’t really understand because my blog was mostly a monolog. At the time I didn’t really care because my blog was basically a way to get my ideas in order as well as a way to keep improving my English.
Things started to change when other blogs started to link to some of my entries as a result to registering my blog with technorati. The first one was MyAppleMenu that linked an entry I wrote on the future of learning, which surprised me since it wasn’t really Mac related. In that case, even though there was a spike in the number of readers, only one person cared enough to leave a comment, to which I responded quickly. That wasn’t much of a conversation, though.
Today I got an entry picked by MacDailyNews. Wow, the number of accesses went through the roof. However, at the time I am writing this entry, only two persons had left a message on my blog. On the other hand, on the MDM site, tens of users exchanged their point of view over my article. What does it mean? Well, from my point of view I do now agree that blogs are conversations, however, as with real conversations, people like to talk at places where they know that they will get answers from others who share their interests (the virtual cafe), in this case the MacDailyNews site.
This may be a problem for bloggers who may find that the conversation that they started is continued somewhere else, not because they are eager to get hits on their site but because they may lose track of what people say about their articles. I think that we need tools that allow us to understand better how ideas are propagated over the Net. This would be very interesting for political ideas as well as more general social issues. Don’t get me wrong, I do no t want to implement an electronic version of Big Brother watching us all that could eventually terminate our hard earned liberties, on the contrary. What I would like is to be able to discuss ideas and understand how people react to these ideas, no matter where they decide to react to them. This would be a great way to discuss the issues that are important to all of us, understand the concerns people may have as well as the reasoning of those who oppose the ideas altogether. There is much talk about social networking, but I think that we still aren’t there yet. We will probably have to wait for Web 3.0.