Scoble Gets the Future of Blogs All Wrong
Posted on August 31, 2007
Filed Under facebook, review, video, web 2.0 |
Dear Scoble,
First, let me say. Robert…Mr. Scoble…you’ve been under a lot of heat lately. I don’t want to add to that. You’ve been extremely graceful while under fire. BUT! Wow, do you miss the mark with your latest Kyte video about the “blog of the future.” Let me tell you why.
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If you don’t have time to watch the video, here’s the lowdown. Scoble says that blogs have become cluttered with ads, widgets, sidebar calendars etc. Lots of elements that take attention away from the central content of the blog. Up to this point I agree with Scoble. Then he goes TOTALLY AWRY!
Scoble suggests a blog interface where all of the sidebar bits (Facebook links, Twitter widgets etc) are relegated to “books” that zoom in and out similar to CoverFlow.
If you’ve never seen Coverflow, it looks like this:
How pretty! How very Iphone! How very useless and against the whole concept of a blog! Who are blogs for? Are they for the blogger or the reader? What Scoble describes is the ultimate personal homepage. I’d love to be able to see all my daily goodies on one easy-to-navigate page but this is not a blog. A blog faces outward to an audience. It should be easy to read, easy to navigate, and the text shouldn’t be buried in some snazzy Flash interface. My blog page isn’t perfect; there’s some junk on it but the purpose behind everything on it is to help the reader, not help me.
I know Scoble is brainstorming here and I think he has some good points but not to apply to blogs. I agree with him about the need for simplicity on the page so the content is featured but that’s about where the agreement stops. A blog should be simple, uncluttered and created solely with the reader/audience in mind.
Is it egotistical to think that readers are really dying to see your Facebook profile so easily? Or that they’re dying to be able to see your Flickr page without leaving your blog? There’s nothing wrong with linking to other iterations of your identity to allow your readers t find out more about you. Doing so contributes to your ethos and your trustworthiness but it should be subtle. Not “in your face.”
Blogs are not personal homepages. If we’re going to redefine how a blog would work best we need to keep two things in mind: 1) easy to write 2) easy to read. That’s it.
Back to the whiteboard, Scoble. Give it another shot.
Sincerely,
Intellagirl
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8 Responses to “Scoble Gets the Future of Blogs All Wrong”
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To be honest, I took him off of my RSS reader ages ago so that I could focus on content producers. Interesting to hear he’s been under fire lately… what about?
I agree with you that the idea is nonsense. It’s a very Microsoft kind of idea, isn’t it? People will buy it because of how flashy it looks and then wonder why nothing works very well.
Flash does not add to the quality of the content. And content seems to be what has fallen to the wayside.
BTW Now I really want an iPhone!
Caleb: funny, you might like two things I’m doing better than my blog:
1) http://www.ScobleShow.com. In the past year I’ve put up more than 300 videos, about 200 of which are with CEOs of various tech companies.
2) My Google Link blog. I read more than 800 blogs and share the best stuff (usually about 80 items a night). http://www.google.com/reader/shared/14480565058256660224
As to discussion about the UI. You don’t need to make it a Flash-based interface. I discuss that as a way to make the page cleaner by moving stuff onto other “blades”.
Flash content is not searchable by search engines, either, is it?
I respect Scoble, and count him an ally. But I disagree with this strategy.
I think blogs should, or at least can, be Micro Multi Mobile: micro-content, multi-media, mobile viewable.
Scoble also made a serious error putting his controversial message in a video, which is not parseable or searchable.
At least provide a text summary, if not a complete text version of such information.
So who cares if he is right or wrong - take it as a suggestion or even inspiration, you don’t have to follow his suggestion if you don’t like it.
Having said that though - Robert may not have the most read blog on the web - but he has certainly made a name for himself and anyone who can manage to stand out among all the bloggers in the world is obviously doing something right.
Well, Robert Scoble never claims to have come up with the answers for anything. He has however claimed to be adding to the conversation.
If you take the time to watch this video, and the three from last weekend, you’ll see he is just throwing his unvarnished ideas an opinions into the blogosphere, looking for input. He likes to start conversations. He’s often wrong, but doesn’t hesitate to try something new.
The point of putting these ideas in a video are to test the waters for using video for blogging real thoughts instead of putting them in text. It is a problem if you want to tag and search inside video.
I’m not a Scoble ditto-head, but at least give the guy credit for trying new things, placing his ideas out there for everyone to comment on, and accepting (some rather angry) criticism in a pretty rational fashion.
The blog of the future will have many permutations to many people, just like today. Personally I don’t think it’ll be much different - just new technology to solve the same problems. The real problem of blogs today is the successful proliferation of widgets and of advertising.
Heck, Robert starts out with a simple clean blog “slate” and then wants to add fancy gadgets to animate page and widget rendering shows that the “bling” aspect of blogs will not go away.
As long as there is money to be made, advertising won’t go away either. It’s up to all of us to push the boundaries and find better ways to present the content that we so dearly say we want to promote.
Ugh, I feel I just descended into another rambling, raving post… sorry everybody.
Regards,
Rick Mahn
or to put it a little more succiently - he’s play tag with the shark
http://www.winextra.com/2007/08/30/playing-tag-with-the-sharks/
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