The future of blogging: tools and trends
Elizabeth Lawley (mamamusings)
Steve Broback (Blog Business Summit)
Matt Mullenweg (WordPress, PhotoMatt)
Liz speaks!
Easy integration
- Vox from Six Apart - you can easily integrate photos, videos, books you bought from Amazon, into your blog and your blog posts.
Low overhead
I don't want to spend a lot of time blogging, don't want to do a lot of
work to post something, maintain my blog. But there are a lot of things
to maintain - links, photos.
- ShoZu runs in the background on her cameraphone. When she takes a
photo, it says, "Do you want to save this to Flickr?" Then Flickr
displays her photo in the badge on the sidebar of her blog. So people
can follow along as she takes photos.
- del.icio.us linkrolls
Mobile input/retrieval
The problem with taking a photo of a bar code isn't resolution, it's
focal length. Microsoft Research figured out: put a lens on it.
Take a photo of a bar code,
Aura software client says, "Hey, here's the book you just entered!", saves it to the associated Web site.
Selective sharing
In the real world, we don't break everything down into Friends and Family.
- LiveJournal is the only site that lets you make fine levels of distinctions.
- This distinction is important in corporate environments. I don't
want to run multiple internal blogs to communicate wiith different
colleagues. I want per-post user-defined selective sharing.
- Another use: Premium Content.
Selective publishing
This post could go on one or more of the blogs I post to. Don't want to
jump from one blog to another. Want an integrated experience.
Socially filtered search
I want to filter my search results through my social network. I don't
care what the most popular link on delicious is. I care what the people
I know and trust are bookmarking. (What health sites is my doctor
bookmarking?)
I don't care what the most popular blogs say about a topic, I want to know what the thought leaders in my field think.
- del.icio.us - RSS feed of results from 24 hand-picked individuals. (Thinks of del.icio.us as a lightweight blogging service.)
- Bloglines - search for posts anywhere, search for posts only in my feeds.
Matt speaks!
I'm going to disagree with a great deal of what you said.
Ciites Plato's Republic - different classes of people.
Our noble lie: Technology matters, usability matters, if we take
something we have and make it easier, it'll take off. "Let's deploy a
wiki at our company, but call it something else and make it easier."
But they aren't hard!
You're not here because you love a particular tool. You have a goal, and blogs are a mechanism. It's not about the technology.
VIPF curve - who creates the content, who reads it, who is unaffected.
What I see is the big trend is personalization. You can have a piece of
the Web, like you can have a book, a house. Every del.icio.us page
looks like every other page.
MySpace and YouTube embrace the chaotic ways in which people express
themselves. The fundamentals of design are changing. People who know
nothing of the Golden Mean are the people who are doing design now.
Steve speaks!
It would be great if you walked into a wine store and the wine in your
price range glows. And you take a taste, say "That was good. I'd
recommend that," and it's
done.
Microformats.
Matt:
The primary problem with live search engines like Technorati is that
their user base is primarily people searching for themselves, or
running tests such as Scoble describes. (Searching for Calcanis'
announcement yesterday, and "sex and alcohol" - an experiment proposed
during the SEO panel.)
Dave Taylot chimes in with the observation that Matt doesn't want to
control the chaotic nature of the internet but isn't interested in the
temporal dimension of it.
(Observation: holy crap, these are smart people.)
If he could buy two companies, Matt would buy Amazon and Sun. Unsexy, but innovative.
Liz would buy Amazon and Six Apart.
Liz plays the "MySpace is ugly" Ze Frank episode. Dang, Ze is like the phantom panelist at this event.