At the end of the blog hype - the bigger picture emerges

Do you remember that "blog" was Merriam Webster"s word of the year 2004? You will also recall that the blogosphere still got a lot of attention last year. E.g. Business Week declared on its cover in May 2005 that “Blogs Will Change Your Business”, Forbes warned of the “Attack of the Blogs” in a title story in November, and countless conferences and events on blogging were held throughout the year. It seems, however, that 2006 might be the year when the hype on blogs is finally over. A couple of weeks ago, many international blogging luminaries met for the reboot8 conference in Copenhagen. When it was over, one of them, Hugh McLeod, gratefully observed (see post on June 4th) that they hardly had spoken about blogs or the blogosphere.

Why is that? Well, it certainly doesn’t mean that blogs are now less important or that the growth of the blogosphere has slowed. It hasn’t. They are just beginning to put blogs into the larger context they deserve. Blogs are only one of many new media tools that empower a rapidly growing number of people to have a public voice and interact with their peers. For that reason we always preferred to talk about peer-to-peer media rather than blogs only. Many others call this larger context Web 2.0. It was O'Reilly Media and MediaLive International who planted this term in the public discussion with the first of the annual Web 2.0 Conferences in October 2004. They recognized that the use of the internet had reached a new phase that created a platform for innovation and new business models which clearly was bigger than blogs. Since then Web 2.0 has made a quite impressive career as a term in the public discussion and is now in a good position to become the next word of the year.

While the discussions on Web 2.0 certainly helped to put new media tools into a broader perspective, there are still many open questions. I believe there are three closely related dimensions to be explored and integrated: technology, business and society. So far, Forrester’s brief report on “Social Computing” from February 2006 is the best effort in this direction I am aware of. Forrester’s researchers realized that there is a whole host of peer-to-peer technologies like blogging, RSS, file sharing, open source software, podcasting, search engines or wikis which increasingly shape the way we socialize. They also acknowledged that social forces drive the development and adoption of these technologies. Social computing is their term to capture the way technologies and social dynamic come together creating a shift of power from institutions like governments or corporations to communities of socially connected people. Everyone is empowered to connect with others who share an interest in something. From Forrester’s perspective, these digitally powered communities of interest do have a major impact on businesses. E.g. they can be a source of innovation in product development and marketing, but they also decrease brand-loyalty.

Forrester’s report creates a framework that is sensitive to the bigger picture, but it still leaves many fundamental questions open. E.g. what does the empowerment of communities mean to our socio-economic environment? Does it even support a shift to communism? I certainly don’t think so, but a recent discussion on the site of the Edge Foundation proved that the answer is not as obvious as you might expect. In an article entitled “Digital Maoism” computer scientist and digital visionary Jaron Lanier tried to show that the empowerment of communities means “nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise”, posing a real threat to the concept of individuality. Lanier’s piece received responses from many internet celebrities such as Clay Shirky, Esther Dyson or Dan Gillmor rendering his major assertion pointless, but it clearly highlighted the need for discussion and inspired some interesting thoughts. The discussion is certainly worth a read, even if the question how community and individuality can find the right balance in peer-to-peer environments remains unanswered.

Another fundamental question that needs a lot of further investigation is how intellectual property rights will have to evolve. Peer-to-peer media environments are all about participation, intellectual property is all about exclusivity. While it presents a huge opportunity for businesses to tap into their communities driving innovation, what does that mean for their business model? Let’s take a look at a simple example. If someone writes a book in continuous exchange with his readership on a blog, does that change the concept of authorship and the respective copyright? Will we by default see more and more tasks turn into open source projects? If so, how will business models look like? And what will that mean to patents and licensing?

At the end of the blog hype, these questions on the bigger picture are emerging. We will need better answers to them than we currently have, if we want to make peer-to-peer tools successful for businesses, beneficial to society and efficient as technology.

Georg Kolb

Technorati tags: blogs, Web 2.0, reboot8.0, Forrester, social computing