Are Many Blogging Less? Blog to Listen

I started with the idea that we are blogging less and yet believe we should be blogging more and Blogging to Listen. I’ve not got a statistical sample and yet I have a suspicion that many of the people I’ve watched and linked to since I started blogging in 2002 are blogging less.

• Have I just lost sight of your feed and where you are… New URL etc?
• Does it conflict with new business interests?
• Has your company put in a policy that affects your blogging?
• Is it because the “marketing” effort didn’t pay out?
• Are too many tools and updates requesting attention…the fragmented self?
• Are you hiding on Del.icio.us?
• You are no longer on Doc’s blogroll (hat tip to Hugh re Scoble)
• Was it simpler… just wanted to put the time into other things?
• You simply got it out of your system and are now anti-blogging?

At this point I Googled “Why people blog less?” and got some usual suspects. I liked Hugh’s take (Scoble quit Microsoft) and visual. I don’t know if Steve Rubel thinks it is still Twitter and the Attention Laws? He may have changed his view as Twitter appears to be increasing readership.

By contrast I’m blogging even more today. I wrote a post now many moons ago “Giving Up Traditional Blogging” I lamented then that I wanted more community / collective intelligence in a platform that would be more open and encourage participation. I’m not there yet although I’ve not given up on this broader idea.

link » (I’ve cut down the verbage…. )

• I took to blogging when I could see that participation in blogs and newsreaders would simply accelerate my learning.
• Newreaders: As my Newsreading list expanded I began managing it in new ways. Feedster became a savior, tracking “topics” (now Google blog search)
• Link blog — was too time consuming. Many pages I would have liked to note and save weren’t blog ready and frankly putting them in my favorites file was like sticking them in a draw. (today del.icio.us)
• “social bookmarking” - Furl, del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, In these solutions I have yet another way to filter and see what others are looking at. Wonderful for say sharing competitive intelligence. (tagging and more now it works…)
• The social connections and the word (tag) connections in the data are simply becoming more important to me. (topic searchs are more important)
• Blogs aren’t adapting to this new reality. Blogs remain static in structure, they haven’t evolved much. (I’m visiting new blogs more than ever; how they look tells me a lot)

The empowerment we are finding in Facebook will find its way to our personal blogs and personal spaces. It’s easier than ever to add bookmarking, presence updates and more back in to our blogs. So why aren’t we doing more of it?

So while I don’t yet have Facebook controls on my blog; I can see them coming. It’s easy for me to create the newsfeed of notes and place it in the sidebar. I can similarly bring in all my friends tweets.. etc. RSS provides me with simple ways to do this. Where it falls down…is getting information on new apps or widgets, or changes in groups. Perhaps Google will release this as part of their API. Then I could create the lifestream I want of my friends information… and not what they push at me.

Discreet Controls Required.

• Subscriptions: I need to generate or make clear to my subscribers what level of subscription. Eg all my blogs, my tweets, delicious, dopplr, or certain elements. How do they choose what to pull in or ignore? We lack any fine grained control here.
• Push: I also don’t have any control over who can see what’s going out. I can’t encrypt personal messages for family vs friends vs work etc. Why can’t I? Shouldn’t your reader just report on data that you have a key for?

I’m thinking blogs are coming full circle because what they put out — RSS — is becoming easier than ever to bring back in. With unique names on bookmarking I could even subscribe to feeds tracking my name. Be no worse than approving comments.

In an early post I wrote about Building Community News It was about RSS. I had a sense that RSS would really enable us to share more. Today the explosion of feeds means that for many Blogging is no longer about blogging as in talking out.. it is about listening and taking in the chatter.

However, I wish blogs were available when I was SVP Marketing and Sales. Realtime cross-functional cross-regional sharing would go up n’fold.

Blogs are growing in importance for those that listen. Even if you plan on lurking capturing that stream of listening is becoming a valuable knowledge resource. Today, I believe that listening is the place to start with blogging.