I’ve been involved in what could euphemistically be called the “Services” game for awhile. Back at Linuxcare, I did Professional Services (proserv for those in the know). Then we mustered a small army of dedicated open source consultants to the very far ends of the world; working with the IBMs, the Dells, the HPs. We all knew that service was not the end and there existed this thing called “the final mile”. This mile referred to the post delivery mechanism for ensuring our customers, their customers, and the end users all over would be supported and happy.
Now I have a question. Will all these blog services ever really matter? We have Technorati, Bloglines, Pubsub, Feedburner, and some that seem to cross over like Flickr. They all seem to sets of integrated goods that we all seem to need. But when you do services, I think you have to ask the question, “who is to benefit from the service?” All of these benefit groups of bloggers that want to find something out about someone else. The something may be:
- what a person thinks or believes
- where a person lives or is involved with
- what a person reads and finds interesting
- why a person really writes a blog
Each one captures some essence of the spirit of the blog to me. We know that there are these authorities out there that have massive numbers of inbound links which correlate to lots of people reading their political, ideological, and philosophical homelies. But do we need all that to find the authorities? And do any of really believe that the so-called authority has anything of true value to say to us if we question why we still blog? Thoreau said that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation” and perhaps we are desperate to find what others think, what they write, and why. But I also believe many millions of bloggers really could care less. Questions about the relative merit of atom versus RSS. If a person has a so-called “side-blog”, if a person has more than one blog, if a person blogs something cool like Linux, if a person works for Microsoft, if a person blogs and then kills people, etc…. Many people like all this. But I venture to guess that many more do not. What they want is freedom. Freedom to blog, to write, to complain, to discuss and cuss. Its the release and not the authority figures that tell them what is really important and who to link to. Blogging surpasses all that with its simplicity. We all can live on the tail end of the right side of the comet and blog and discuss and be happy with it. Perhaps we don’t have thousands, hundreds, or even single visitors; but its the mere act.
So, I think the blogging services are worth it when we use them to find something out. But for mere blogging perhaps their presence is less important and we rely on our own human conditions to answer our important, vanity, selfish, and ultimately human questions.
The 5 w’s…
duh.
