What is the Internet For?
This is my answer to Matt Craven’s Blog Herald podcast in which he touches on Syntagma’s rebadging as a Web Network Magazine.
So, what *is* the internet for? Is it a giant train set for geeks to play with? Is it simply another publishing tool for publishing folk? The answer is both, of course. The problem lies in the interface between the two.
The question that Matt brings up yet again — naturally — is, what is a blog network? Subsidiary questions that arise here include, should a blog network confine itself to the blogosphere? ; are hybrid models acceptable? (to whom?) ; and can a blog network transform itself so that it becomes something else?
The answers must be either : No, Yes and Yes, or we live in a police state.
Generally there are two kinds of user in the professional/commercial blogosphere. Those whose business (or main interest) is the internet itself : the hardware, the software, the services, and something called Web 2.0.
The other users are essentially publishers. They don’t care much about the platform — they pay others to worry about that — but their business uses the internet as a publishing tool without obsessing, or even knowing much, about it.
The former will have businesses beginning with Blog- or The Blog XXXXXX. Words like blogosphere and blog network loom large in their daily round.
The latter will have businesses that draw on words like media, publishing, magazine. In some senses they are the future of the internet, because the original geek base which created it is getting smaller by the hour in proportion to the whole (as Duncan Riley pointed out last year).
When a blog network starts up it’s usually driven by the tech set. Weblogs Inc was started by technology watchers and technologists, while b5media has a systems engineer as CEO, and three other directors whose sole concern is working in, consulting on, and writing about, the internet, especially the blogosphere.
Now that’s perfectly fine. Who else would start a blog network apart from people who had some interest in the platform? The problem comes though at the next stage of development (see my earlier post on this). A blog network is essentially a hybrid beast developing within the techy world of open-source software, but reaching out to the world of publishing generally.
Consequently, any network that doesn’t make the transition from serverside to general readership is doomed to remain an incestuous half-formed creature feeding off its own offal.
A blog network must develop a personality in the way a magazine does. Without a bonding element and a common thread it’s just an incoherent link farm of bits and pieces. Numbers don’t count here, it’s the whole package, its brand and cohesion that form the public face of its product.
Then it has to have quality content of a high professional standard that non-blogospherics want to read. You can serve geeks only, of course — TechCrunch is a fine example — but how many TechCrunches can the market bear? TechCrunch is a big fish in shallow waters.
For a blog network to take root it has to transform itself into something recognizable to a much wider audience, a magazine, for instance. The CEO and others have to leave their technology past behind and become publishers, with all the traditional skills that publishers have. Otherwise they will suddenly hit a wall where their arts are no longer good enough for the next stage up.
Syntagma Media’s conversion from a blog network to a Web Network Magazine was inevitable at some stage. We’ve done it sooner than most, that’s all. Coincidentally, its CE (yours truly) was an author and publisher in a previous pre-blogosphere existence.
I predict many of the others will follow us down this route in time. If they don’t, they’re doomed.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.
Well said, John. It’s the difference between all those bad free-sheets that will insist on coming through the letter box, and, for instance, The New Yorker, or The Spectator. Quality - and a feel for both the readership and the advertiser - will invariably rise to the surface.
By Steve Newman on August 30th, 2006 at 7:40 am
Nail on the head, Steve. I predict the words “blog” and “blogging” will go right out of fashion quite quickly. Many of the new networks are not using them now — MSN Spaces, and Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace are good examples. Unfortunately, some folk have embedded the words in their domain and business names. They should reposition themselves before the tide of progess hits them.
By John Evans on August 30th, 2006 at 9:05 am
I’ve been working behind the scenes to market a bunch of sections or channels of my own sites in the network .. a “LVR” series of blogs … a “Battling” series of blogs … a “HART” series of blogs .. and one more in development .. In a way, it will become my way of making a ‘Magazine’ type of environment that you talk about.
But, it’s not to become a magazine. I just think that as networks go .. take yourself, b5media, and others .. there are just too many blogs for readers to add into their feed reader or Bloglines and read every day. I have my “dailies” and “must read eventuallies” but when I have time to surf, I basically pick my poison and start surfing the sidebars. If that’s not a flipping the pages like reading a magazine .. what is?
Anyway .. I don’t have any blogs with the name “blog” or “blogging” in the domain itself, but I do include the word in most of my name titles (eg PetLvr.com - [The Blog]) .. But I disagree that that term will be obsolete or forgotten. This is the way I see this:
We still use and prefer .com’s but don’t need to. I thought browsers were finally smartening up and when you type in a domain without the dot com extension into the browser .. it would just go to that page. Now - because of the many extensions (and online advertising) .. the search engines need to be supplemented financially and browsers go to the search page instead.
Then, people started to look for something shorter than since “dot com” extensions didn’t really matter .. and “E” was born. E-commerce sites starting with “E”, for electronic? Whatever. It became so popular that people tried something new .. with the next vowel .. “I” for information .. iTunes, even iSyntagma .. Right now we are seeing the bogus splog sites with double dashes or stuff like that but, sooner or later we’ll see the “A” sites (then AA sites, AAA sites, etc) will be everywhere .. trying to be like a phone book and end up at the top of sorted lists. Soon .. “O” sites will be popping up .. for opinion sites I guess. Maybe with all these so called Web 2.0 sites start realizing that if they think they are web 2.0 they probably are 0.5 and just have names starting with “U” instead.
Unfortunately, the future looks bleak for us oldtimers. There are no longer any short domains available. We’ll get sick of the longer spelled out domains that are getting longer and longer and keyword rich. We’ll run out of Vowel-site domains. So what’s left? Our successors will be the young kids instant messaging and phone text messaging that are typing new languages - like the old telex days .. less characters to save space. It will be more than just having sites converting acronyms (lol, dna, brb, afaik, etc etc) but include new word abbreviations (lmfao, w8t, etc etc).
Yes. We will long for the good life of domains with normal names in them - including “blog” or “blogging”.
By HART (1-800-HART) on August 30th, 2006 at 5:11 pm
You make good sense, as always, HART.
Here, you’ll see a gradual development towards a more magazine-like operation. (Remember “magazine” comes from the French word for “shop”).
We’re looking for more innovative ways of doing the front page of Syntagma as a magazine cover, with the blog as a separate sub-domain or on iSyntagma.com. Not easy, but we’ll get there. Jeremy’s given us 3 to 6 months, which is very generous, as I’ve set 2 to 3 months.
By John Evans on August 30th, 2006 at 5:24 pm
Good call John, We stopped calling all our sites “blogs” and call them web magazines (description on starked.com). What’s the difference between many sites that all focus on different content updated daily and Conde Nast’s websites besides format. Anyway, Us weekly uses a blog format to publish a lot of their content and they are still a magazine.
Seriously, to the mass audience, they don’t know what the hell a blog network is, we too identify ourselves as a online magazine
By Roy Tahsin on September 2nd, 2006 at 9:12 am
Absolutely, Roy, blog networks are already outmoded as they’ve followed WIN too slaveishly without considering other innovative ways to branch out beyond the tech space. Anyone not interested in tech, will not have much faith in blogs to deliver the content expected of a magazine.
By John Evans on September 2nd, 2006 at 6:25 pm