The Panel Discussion
This entry was originally at http://kingsley.blog-city.com/read/47350.htm
Anna University’s Media Sciences department conducted a National Panel Discussion on Blogging. I was on one of the panels with Anita, moderated by Kribs. I had a wonderful time talking to everyone there. The event is being covered in detail by Kribs and commented upon by Anita and OJ. Anand, Kaushik, Wasim, Rohini and all the other Media Science students did a great job organizing the event. Turbans off guys! Anish wound it up with a thumping good quiz and managed to make me glug a bottle of Slice, a drink that I’d succesfully evaded for years.
Interesting discussions where 2 a penny and mostly offline. One of the thoughts I had was about the social awkwardness of meeting fellow bloggers in flesh and blood. You are left devoid of all the trivial questions people ask to start conversations - “So where do you work?” “What do you do?”- you know all that already! I think part of the awkwardness of the earlier bloggers meet was because of this. And then we end up discussing Movable Type, Blogger and syndication and bore the pants off anyone within a ten mile radius. On the other hand, in smaller groups (4-5), we seem to hit it off pretty well, and are able to laugh off our own awkwardness.
One of the panels that strayed most was the one on “Practical uses of Blogs”. Bharath and Kribs all but got into a good-natured fist fight over whether blogs are a big deal or not. Bharath’s contention is that, well websites have been around for ages now and all blogs offer are a minor improvement in how they are maintained. Technically, he’s right, the technology difference is almost trivial. Blogs existed before the first blogging tools became available - painstakingly hand coded by enthusiasts (read:lifeless geeks who survived on monitor glow) on a daily basis. Communities of people sharing information existed way before the internet. I have almost nostalgic memories of dialing to Atul Chitnis’ Cix BBS in Bangalore from Chennai after 9 with a PC-AT and an internal card modem, long before there was any Internet connectivity in India. Bulletin boards and mailing lists have offered tools for instant conversation and knowledge sharing. So, Bharath is justified in wondering: “What’s the big deal about blogs anyway?”.
The Big Deal about blogs now : The advent of easy to use tools that make keeping a journal very easy. A drop in the skill level required to maintain a journal has led to the following behavioral consequences:
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More frequent updates
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Less formality of content
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More trivial content getting posted
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More commentary and cross linking
The changes in behavior in turn have spurred technological growth. It’s doubtful whether RSS, Trackback etc., would have happened if it wheren’t for the people who are blogging and are interested in those features. Therefore blogging is significant for 2 reasons: the widespread behavioral and social changes caused by an increase in usability, and the consequent boom in technologies that support those behavioral changes.
Blogging tools join the illustrious lineage of the desktop PC, Windows 95 and Netscape Navigator - all of them bringing about huge behavioral and business changes simply by improving usability. All of them where designed with what people want in mind, instead of what machines are capable of.
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