>> Kevin Schofield: My name is Kevin Schofield. I'd like to welcome Scott Rosenberg
who's visiting us as part of the speaker series today.
Scott's here to discuss his new book, Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's
Becoming, and Why It Matters.
Blogs are everywhere. They've exposed truths and spread rumors, made and lost
fortunes, brought couples together, torn them apart, and changed the political landscape.
Say Everything chronicles blogging's unplanned rise and improbable triumph, tracing its
impacts on politics, business, the media, and our individual lives.
Scott tells a story in a very personal way by tracing the stories of the individual people
who made it happen. He also speculates on what happens next now that the blogosphere
has become an unstoppable force, but with Facebook, MySpace and Twitter quickly
rising in prominence.
Scott's a journalist, editor, and blogger. He was cofounder of Salon.com and an early
participant in The Well. His first book was the best-selling Dreaming in Code: Two
Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs and One Quest for Transcendent
Software.
Right after the talk, Scott will be signing your books if you want to up here, so just come
on up to the podium.
Please join me in welcoming Scott Rosenberg to Microsoft to discuss his book. Thanks,
Scott.
[applause]
>> Scott Rosenberg: Thanks. Thanks so much. How is my level here? Can you all hear
me? Pull that one away. We have the two-mic problem.
Thanks. So it's great to see you all here. My book, as Kevin said, tells the story of
blogging. Where did this thing come from? Who got it going and what were their
stories?
It's kind of contemporary history. And when people hear that, I get two reactions: there's
one group of people, mostly in the technology industry, that says blogging? That's old
hat. It's 1999. We've moved on. And then there's another group, and this group is
maybe a little bit more numerous that says blogging? History? What history? It's so
new, how can there be a history?
So in fact blogging by that name is now a decade old. And Web sites that were really
blogs in all but name have been around since roughly the mid-1990s. So there's a lot of
history, a lot of stories, tales of what happens when people get the chance to say
everything they want to in public. And I think these stories have a lot to teach us.
Those of us working in the technology industry can learn how innovations emerge in
ways that we never expected or planned for. And everyone can learn from the experience
of blogging's pioneers about how to navigate the opportunities and the pitfalls of life
online.
The culture of Silicon Valley, of the technology industry, and certainly of the Web tends
to have a very short memory. And even though the story of how blogging began is a
recent one, it's not that well known.
I thought it would be a good idea to get it down while it's still fresh. And I watched a lot
of it myself firsthand.
So let's go back to the early days of the Web in the mid-'90s. I don't know, many of
you -- oh. I'm sorry. My slides are not advancing. Oh, there we go. Many of you have
probably seen this video, the medieval helpdesk. Anyone? You want to raise your hand
if you've seen it?
You know, this is the one where the monk, the Scandinavian monk is freaked out about
this new thing called a book, or as he pronounces it, a book. He has to ask this helpdesk
guy to explain to him how to open it, how to turn the pages and so on. He's used to
scrolls. Books are this weird new interface.
It's a reminder that every technology we take for granted today was once forbidding and
unfamiliar. And the Web was the same way.
So a decade ago I was the technology editor at Salon.com. My job was to find and assign
stories about the Web and computing. We had to get one story a week at first, and later
we ramped it up to one story a day. And we'd take these story, we'd edit them, we'd
illustrate them and we'd publish them with a certain amount of loving care.
And people liked it. We did good work. But we could only do so much. There were a
bunch of other Web sites that I found myself returning to over and over during the course
of my day. Because every time I returned to them, they had something new.
These sites didn't put a lot of time and effort into each story; in fact, they didn't really
publish stories, they posted items. And some of them were produced by professionals,
others were amateurs or one-man shows.
They all shared a couple of traits. They linked a lot. They weren't afraid the way so
many new sites were of sending you away, because they knew that you'd probably be
back.
Even more important, they didn't have a lead story or a top story. Each time they posted
something new, it went at the top of the page. Now, I was an editor and I spent lots of
time in meetings that were held for the purpose of deciding what goes on top of the page.
And here these sites were saying we don't need you to do that; let the timestamp make the
decision for you.
So this was a little distressing, a little hurtful even. But I kept going back to those sites
anyway. They worked. They got the news out fast.
And it was also really easy to figure out what was new since my previous visit.
So in 1998 people began calling these sites Weblogs. And in 1999 that got shortened to
blogs.
And what the early bloggers had discovered was a way of organizing writing that was
native to the Web. It wasn't an import from print or broadcasting, and it wasn't
discovered by people like me who had arrived online with our heads full of notions from
print and broadcasting. It was discovered by outsiders who fell in love with the Web and
what it could do.
So Say Everything tells some of their stories. In the first part of the book I tell the tales of
some of blogging's founders, people who established many of the norms of the blogging
world but whose own stories each have a bit of a tragic dimension; none of these people
actually get from their blogs what they set out to get.
In the second part of the book I tell how blogging scaled up from a tiny world of a few
dozen bloggers to the millions that we have today.
And in the final section I look at what the rise of blogging has meant for our culture, for
journalism and for the future.
So what is a blog? We don't have a very good formal definition. We tend to fall back on
that old supreme court formulation of how to recognize pornography: we know a blog
when we see it.
The usual definition is a personal Web site where the newest material goes on top often
with lots of links to other sites.
Now, that definition is useful. It's also pretty neutral. It describes a form. But blogging
was also the embodiment of a vision. The first implementation to scale of the idea of a
two-way Web.
Today I want to talk a little bit about where that vision came from and how it came to be
embodied in this simple form.
Now, many of you I'm sure know already that the idea of Web pages as read-write
documents goes back to the origins of the Web itself. It was the original vision of Tim
Berners-Lee and his collaborators. It was a sort of a paradise that we lost through early
implementation compromises and have spent years trying to circle back to.
Now, that's a pattern that you find recurring throughout the history of technology and
media. Because big visions are rarely fully implemented at first.
And, in fact, this notion of the read-write Web page, it goes before -- the notion of
read-write documents as the heart of a collaborative environment predates the Web.
It goes back to the first dreams of hypertext collaboration in Douglas Engelbart's famous
1968 demo of his online system. It returns in Ted Nelson's Xanadu project which was
kind of like the Web only all the links went both ways.
And we see it again in the original Web browser that Tim Berners-Lee used at CERN,
which as you -- if you can read says hypermedia browser editor. It was a tool for reading
and writing Web pages.
Now, when Mosaic and Netscape popularized browsing, they punted on the writing part.
So pretty much did all the other browsers. And we've been dealing with the
consequences ever since.
Now, it would be nice if we could say that blogging emerged consciously and
deliberately as a way to restore that situation. But it was much more haphazard, a matter
of chance and luck.
Now, of course the early Web had plenty of bottom-up contributions. Let me show you
this page from a 1995 link list. If you can read the bottom line, some person has exerted
themself to create the Weekend NPR's All Things Considered homepage.
NPR hadn't done it for themselves. Some person, some fan, presumably, stepped forward
and did it.
But to do stuff like that in 1995, you needed to know some HTML, you had to know how
to FTP the document, set up your server space and so on.
Even later when companies like GeoCities came along, they made it easier to publish a
Web page. But updating the page was a real pain, and these services eventually became
vast wastelands because people just put up pages and then sort of let them decay.
Blogging was where most people got their first picture of what a valuable Web built by
everyday users might really look like.
So let's break the definition of blog down a bit. There are three elements: the personal
Web site, newest material is on top, and there are lots of links.
So personal Web sites. Where did this idea come from? Who got the idea that a Web
site could or should be personal?
I think it begins with the idea of homepage. Now, home was a concept that was
introduced in the earliest days of Web navigation. Home was where you could always
return if you lost your way in the hypertext thicket. Home was the root of the tree.
Only later did home as a metaphor kick in, and people started talking about my homepage
as sort of a digital front porch, a place to display bits and pieces of their lives.
The pre-Web Internet had always ways for individuals to present themselves. There were
.plan files on UNIX-based systems, there were introductions on mailing lists and so on.
But the rise of personal Web sites was not a foregone conclusion in the early days of the
Web.
A key person in making that happen was Justin Hall. That was his site I showed you
before with the NPR All Things Considered link. Hall was a 19-year-old college student
who started his site, links.net, in January of 1994 and started posted daily in 1996.
Now, in '94 the Web was mostly filled with academic research. Hall looked at it and
thought, hey, I can make a Web site and it can be all about me. He also started linking to
other sites he found that he liked that he thought were cool or weird.
So right there you have two foundations of blogging: autobiography and links.
Now, Hall was sort of the original oversharer. He really did know no boundaries. He
really did say everything including detailed accounts of his love life and even sometimes
nude pictures of himself. I won't show you those.
A decade later, after ten years of this, blogging every day, many years, he fell in love
with a woman who told him basically it's the blog or me.
Now, Hall did make the sensible choice in this situation. I'm happy to be able to tell you.
When I interviewed Hall's friend and mentor Howard Rheingold about him, Rheingold
told me that Hall has what he called an endearing habit of shoving you aside, sitting
down at your computer, and reconfiguring everything for your own good. Changing the
settings of your Web browser and your word processor, arranging your desktop using
helpful features that you didn't even know about.
In a sense, Hall did the same thing for the Web itself. In its formative stages he turned it
into an arena for youthful self-exposure. He took a medium that had been conceived as a
repository for scholarship and scaled it down to personal size.
Then he took his confessions and intimacies and blasted them out to the world.
The Web made all that possible, but Hall made it the norm, the expected, the default.
Now, another key figure in the shaping of the Web as a personal medium was Dave
Winer. He was already a successful software entrepreneur when the Web came along.
But as a developer for the Macintosh, he'd felt burned. Apple owned the platform. And
independent developers were at that owner's mercy.
The Internet looked exciting to him. It was a new platform that no one company owned.
Winer say that the Web gave everyone the opportunity to tell their own story. He saw
that that mattered not only existentially the way it had mattered to a 19-year-old like
Justin Hall, but also practically it mattered in terms of his business and his work.
Now, Winer had started an e-mail newsletter called DaveNet in 1994 because he felt that
the tech industry press did a lousy job covering his field. He saw that the rise of the
Internet meant the participants in the industry didn't have to depend on these trade
publications to tell their own stories, they could do it themselves. They were the people
formerly known as sources.
Winer went on to create one of the earliest and most influential Weblogs to develop some
of the technology that today's blogs run on and to proselytize for blogging.
He foresaw a future in which billions of people would have their own personal Web sites.
He was sometimes mocked about that by dismissive journalists, but he was right.
Now, he did at some point swap the B for an M, and that -- from that point on he was
really correct. He also harbored a hope that these millions of sites would help make the
Internet a more civil space.
He saw a blog as the unedited voice of a person. Your blog was a space where no one
could tell you to shut up. And once we gave everyone such a space, maybe people would
fight less an communicate better. Now, that hope, I'm sorry to say, has yet to materialize.
So let's move on to the second part of the definition. In blogs the newest material goes at
the top of the page. I think this style of organization came naturally to the programmers
and computer scientists who were among the Web's first publishers. They were thinking
in terms of stacks: last-in, first-out data structures that are a pretty commonplace idea in
lots of software. And you find them in many types of log files and change histories and
so on.
This kind of reverse chronological organization is embedded in the DNA of the Web
from the very start. You find it on Tim Berners-Lee's first Web site at the start of the
1990s. There's a reverse chronological list of Web servers. When new ones came online,
he added them at the top. There's NCSA when it was a new Web site.
Now, when Marc Andreessen started keeping the NCSA What's New page, which later
became the Netscape What's New page, it followed exactly the same format.
When media professionals arrived in a wave on the Web, beginning in 1994 they brought
new metaphors from print and retail. Their pages were not lists. They were magazine
covers or retail stores or even reservation desks. These were image maps that you could
click on and sites were flashy, sometimes they were fun, but they were not easy to
navigate. The metaphors actually got in the way.
Now, another problem these early Web sites had was simply distinguishing new material.
Publishers started putting little yellow new icons next to links, as you can see on this
page from Yahoo! in 1996. The trouble was: New since when? New to whom?
Fortunately the reverse chronological list never went away. And in 1997 it began turning
up on a new wave of streamline news sites in the tech area, sites like Slashdot and Dave
Winer's Scripting News that I showed you earlier that were created by programmers and
read by people like me.
At the end of that year, the term Weblog was coined by Jorn Barger for his site which he
called the Robot Wisdom Weblog. Now, this is also where we get to the third part of the
definition: lots of links.
Robot Wisdom was Barger's play on the term artificial intelligence, a subject that he was
passionate about along with many other subjects. His site was an incredibly eclectic log
of links. He talked about finding treasures on the Web and wanting to share them. He
wrote terse descriptions of his links and he centered them on the page.
Now, the term "Weblog" that he introduced carried some history, some charge. In a
recent piece in The Atlantic the blogger Andrew Sullivan traced the origins of the word
"log" in this meaning to the premodern era of nautical navigation.
Ships would drop a weighted log in the water attached by a rope that spooled out and
then measure their speed by the length of the rope that pulled out in a particular time
span, and the rope had knots on it, which is where we get the term nautical knots.
Now, the speed and course was then marked in a book that was called a log. To me, I
heard Weblog and I thought of Star Trek and the captain's log. That was where my head
was at. But I think Barger's original starry design, which you can see here, also pointed
in that direction. He even -- he had this thing where he tracked the phases of the moon. I
put a series of them on there so you could see.
So in 1999 a Web designer named Peter Merholz took this term Weblog and made a joke
about it. It's here under the heading For What It's Worth on the bottom left.
He said from now on he was going to say blog. That abbreviation spread rapidly because
there was already a structure of blogs that were communicating to one another that picked
up this joke, shared it, spread it around.
Okay. So we start the story of blogging with these people like Justin Hall, Dave Winer,
Jorn Barger. They're all outsiders with a passion for this new form and new space. Once
they and the other pioneers I write about got it started, it began to take off.
In Say Everything, I tried to sort of follow a spark that started with software developers
and then spread to upstart journalists, political writers, concerned citizens, and then out
into the business world, pop culture, and beyond.
I tell the story of Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan, the founders of the company that
created Blogger 10 years ago. Blogger was the software that really first brought blogging
out of the tech ghetto and onto a wider stage beginning in 1999. It was a sort of a side
project, a tool that Williams and Hourihan used to communicate with each other even
though they were actually sitting across from the same office. They'd post little notes and
ideas and links to other stuff on the Web.
Then they thought, hey, if we make this public, it might be fun, it might help our
business. Turned out to be right. And then they thought maybe we should create a tool
that makes it easy for anyone else to do the same thing. Turned out to be a good idea.
So from that point forward, the people in stories in my book begin to spread out, just as
blogging did. I write about a young reporter named Josh Marshall who started blogging
during the Florida vote recount in 2000. His site, Talking Points Memo, became a sort of
testbed for using a blog for investigative journalism.
From there I go on to describe how blogging found a home at big companies. Most
notably, this one. At a time when Microsoft's public image was battered by a long
antitrust battle, individual bloggers stepped forward to put a human face on the big
company.
Credit should go here to Joshua Allen who started a Microsoft blog a decade ago. Did
you make it here? No. Okay. Josh and I e-mailed before and was going to try to make it
but had a product to unveil. And I understand that that takes precedence.
He started a decade ago. That started a movement inside the company. And the
Microsoft blogs became the focus of a lot of public attention a few years later, beginning
around 2003 in the era of Robert Scoble. And they remain I think a model of how useful
blogs can be in breaking down the barriers between a big company, its customers, and its
public.
I go on to tell the story of Nick Denton and his Gawker sites, who really invented the
notion of professional blogging, which until that point was really a contradiction in terms.
They fed the obsessions of their readers in smart ways and refined an acid voice that was
so effective many readers came to assume that this voice was what blogs were all about.
But they also took something that had been driven by love and passion and turned it into
a more cutthroat, frantic sort of enterprise.
So I compare the story of Gawker to the success of another blog you might know,
boingboing, which was started as a labor of love, turned into a lucrative business without
ever losing its voice.
Then I also tell the story of a blogger named Heather Armstrong of dooce.com. She
became somewhat well known in 2002 for losing her job as a Web developer because she
had indiscreetly posted catty comments about her coworkers. Later she wrote: My
advice to you is be not so stupid.
Afterwards she started blogging about her family and then, once she became a mom,
about a her young daughter. She's a funny writer. Her blog became really popular.
When she faced a severe postpartum depression, she found support among her readers
that helped her recover.
Now, I hope that the book can tell these stories better than I can in just a few minutes
here, so I'm not going to retell them at length. Instead, what I want to do in the next few
minutes before I open it up to questions is give you my version of a top ten list about
blogging.
Now, it's not a top ten list of blogs, because I think honestly that list would be different
for each one of us here. Instead, here are my top ten myths about blogging. And you
may notice as I go through this list that a lot of them contradict each other. I think that's a
sign of how confused our culture really still is about blogging.
Okay. Here we go. Myth No. 10: Blogging isn't journalism. So the argument is that
bloggers don't pick up the phone, they don't do shoe-leather reporting. They sit around in
their pajamas. They're lazy. All they do is spout opinion.
Now, in fact a blog is just a format for a Web site. Journalism is a practice, it's
something you do anytime you go and you try to figure out what the real story is in a
situation and tell other people about it.
So the whole attempt to put blogs off in this corner and journalism in that is really
misguided, I think. But it is argued ad nauseam.
So really I'm going to do a service for you. I'm going to boil down the controversy into
fewer syllables than a haiku. Some bloggers are doing journalism; others aren't. It's
really not that hard.
Okay. Myth No. 9: Blogs will kill journalism or blogs will we place journalism. Now,
most bloggers who aren't doing journalism don't claim to be journalists. And you almost
never hear bloggers themselves say that they expect mobs of bloggers to replace
professional journalism as we know it. That's really a red herring.
What bloggers have done regularly and for years now is point out problems in
mainstream news coverage. They do so loudly and persistently and sometimes rudely.
Meanwhile, at the same time, the media industry is facing a kind of a financial meltdown.
Most of the financial troubles of the media business, and particularly newspapers, have
been unfolding for decades and they stem from bad business decisions. Blogs themselves
have actually done very little to undermine the news business. But there's no question
that it's in trouble. So we end up constantly hearing, asked the same question: will blogs
be able to fill the void.
Of course not. But they'll serve as an important source of information in many areas.
And they'll provide a great Petri dish for experiments in online news delivery that might
help us figure out how to fill that void.
Myth No. 8: There is a blogosphere. So the word blogosphere entered the parlance
around 2002. And it's appealing. It has a nice ring. It encapsulates what we intuitively
understand about blogs; that they exist in a complex network that forms a sort of
ecosystem of news and information.
Bloggers form communities naturally and sometimes these communities connected to one
another. The blue blobs that you see here are groups of tightly cross-linked blogs. There
are a lot of them.
So there's a problem anytime we say the blogosphere, because there are actually lots of
different blogospheres. The political bloggers think they are the blogosphere. The tech
bloggers think they are the blogosphere. The business bloggers and on and on. Really
the blogosphere is whoever you read.
Myth No. 7: The first blogger. Now, of course we can identify some key early
practitioners. That's part of what I try to do in Say Everything. But there was no first
blog. And trying to identify one, as many people have done, is really a pointless exercise.
It's like asking who was the first novelist or playwright or poet. These are all forms that
evolved. And blogging did too.
Myth No. 6: Bloggers are narcissists. So there's this assumption that bloggers write
about themselves because they think the whole world is interested in the details of their
lives. But, in fact, most personal bloggers are only writing for a small group of friends
and relatives, coworkers. They don't think everyone else cares about their mundane
affairs any more than someone having a phone conversation does.
Now, of course you can find narcissists on the Web. But to blog well, you have to learn
to link well. Blogging is really a social, convivial kind of pursuit. If all you do is stare at
your own navel, you're not going to get very far.
Myth No. 5 is a two-fer, two sides of a coin: Bloggers are extra honest or bloggers can't
be trusted. Now, a lot of bloggers say that if you're blogging, you ought to keep it real.
The act of blogging compels you to be authentic.
Now, there's certainly a more informal tone, a kind of casualness that comes naturally to
the writing on a blog, but we shouldn't mistake that tone for authenticity or
trustworthiness. You can be informal, write in a human voice, and still be lying.
On the other hand, a lot of observers argue that blogs simply can't be trusted because
they're anonymous or because they're amateurish or because they don't have editors.
So let me take those one at a time.
Anonymity. An anonymous blog, like an anonymous anything, should be treated with
caution and care. But anonymity can also help us hear from whistle-blowers or people
who live under repressive governments or just hear stories from inside a workplace or an
institution that we would never have heard if they had to be signed. In those cases,
anonymity is actually expanding the truth that's available to us.
Amateurism. Now, I wish I could say that I trust news professionals more than amateurs,
because I've been one myself, but I spent too many years in a newsroom and I can tell
you that for every careful, reliable, fair, professional journalist out there, there's another
with a hidden agenda or a lazy technique or burned-out ethics. Amateurs and pros can
both be trustworthy or unreliable, and I haven't found any correlation between those two
categories.
Finally, editors. A good editor is a gift. I'm happy to say I had one for this book. But
sadly there are as many editors that subtract value as that add value. And the editorial
process often leeches the personal voice out of writing and sometimes even introduces
new error. At least on most blogs you know exactly who's responsible for what you're
reading.
In the end I think that trust just works differently online than in traditional media. With a
newspaper or magazine or broadcast outlet, reputation is a by-product of the institution.
On the Web, your reputation is a product of who links to you and what they say about
you. Each approach has some advantages, but I think it's pretty silly to say that one or
that either of them has a monopoly.
Myth No. 4: There are too many blogs. Okay. You hear this one a lot. There are a huge
number of blogs. The number that you hear most often is from Technorati, 133 million
blogs globally as of about a year ago.
Now, some huge fraction of those are actually abandoned blogs, so the real number is
almost certainly much smaller than that. But however you cut it, there are millions of
blogs. That's far more than anyone could possibly read, right? What the nightmare.
But wait a minute. I don't think it's a nightmare. I think it's great. I don't feel any
obligation to try to keep up with all of this. I choose which blogs to read the same way I
choose a small number of books to read out of the thousands that are published each year
or a tiny fraction of the movies that are released each year.
Myth No. 3: Blogging is dead. So at the same time that some people are complaining
that there are too many blogs others are telling us that blogging is finished. It's like that
old Yogi Berra line: No one goes there anymore; it's too crowded.
Today the idea that blogging is dead comes chiefly from early adopters in Silicon Valley
and the technology industry. Many of them started blogs in the early part of this decade.
Now they're tired. They're excited by Facebook or Twitter, other kinds of online social
networks. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Any individual blog has a lifecycle. Starts with a certain energy or passion. When that
runs out, so does the blog. Fine. But losing interest yourself doesn't mean that it's time to
write an obituary for the whole phenomenon.
Myth No. 2: Blogging is trivial. This word trivial attached itself to blogging very early
on. Blogs just looked unimportant to the journalists who first wrote about them. The
items were so short, the technology was so cheap, the posts were such a mishmash of
personal and political. Now, what about all those cats?
But today in all the debates that really matter in our society, blogs are where the
substantive action is. If you want to understand an issue like health care reform or the
real estate and banking meltdown, or indeed the debate about the future of journalism,
they're all happening on the blogs that specialize in these subjects.
Blogs are the new public sphere. They're where we can go as deep as we want in any
particular area. They're where we wrangle out the details of our policies and the shape of
our culture. I don't think there's anything trivial about that.
Finally, the No. 1 myth about blogging: Most blogs stink. It's amazing how often you
hear this. It's almost a ritual requirement anytime you say to someone, well, I read blogs,
of course most of them aren't any good. Now, when I hear this I think of -- I grew up as a
science fiction fan. There's a principle in that world called Sturgeon's Law after the
author Theodore Sturgeon who defended the genre when people said it was junk. He
said: Yeah. 90 percent of science fiction is crap; that's because 90 percent of everything
is crap.
So in a Sturgeon's Law sense, maybe most blogs do stink. We've all seen blogs that are
silly or dumb or just sloppily put together. But we should also recognize that most blogs
that have any staying power are the product of someone's passion. And I'd argue that our
readiness to dismiss so many bloggers is a condescending mistake.
We're too quick to be peeved at the effrontery of people who dare to write in public, even
when their work is rough or unpolished. Maybe we're still thinking that all of this online
speech will somehow crowd out the speech that we want to hear.
But the online world doesn't work that way. It's not like broadcast or print where there's a
limited capacity for messages. My blog doesn't crowd out yours; there's room for
everyone.
So that's my 10 myths. But, you know, sometimes it's really nice to go to 11.
So in closing I want to talk a little personally about one more myth, a misunderstanding
that I think is still really widespread, the idea that sooner or later one day the immature
Web will grow up, put on a suit and stop being so rambunctious.
When the Web first became popular 15 years ago, people thought it would enable a new
era of self-expression. I did too. But the Web didn't live up to that at first. It wasn't until
blogging became popular in the first part of this decade that we could see what this era
really looks like.
We started calling it lots of things: Web 2.0, user-generated content, participatory
culture, social networking. All of these terms are really variations on the theme. They
describe the same thing. The fact that we now have a mass medium that invites broad
participation, that offers each of us the opportunity to add a piece of ourselves to it.
Blogging was the first and in some ways still the most significant form that our
contributions to the Web have taken. It's provided us with a wealth of information and a
lot of pleasure, too.
Now, when I started covering the Web in the '90s, the conventional wisdom was that
Web media was starting out as the Wild West, but sooner or later it would become
civilized. The pros, the people from Hollywood and New York who dominated the old
media world would move in and take over and all the little people could go home.
This always struck me as a pretty cynical view. I looked around at the Web and saw this
generous lively outpouring of human creativity, of things that people were doing out of
love or a sense of fun. I didn't want it to end.
But I was a critic by training and a skeptic by inclination, and I kept questioning my
enthusiasm. I worried that the cynics were probably right. We'll lose this battle, I
thought, because losing these sorts of battles seemed inevitable. We'd been losing them
all my life.
But it's a decade later now and we haven't lost. The little people haven't gone home. The
Web keeps evolving. We keep finding new ways to incorporate contributions from
individuals and groups. That's the Web's nature.
And the businesses that think that the Web can and should be tamed into some sort of
variation on the television broadcast model without these contributions keep failing to
make that happen.
So as I wrote Say Everything I realized I was ready to leave my old defeatism behind. I
called the last chapter of the book the Twilight of the Cynics, because I wanted to say that
after 15 years we now have the evidence to declare definitively that the Web is not and is
never going to be like television.
Unless someone messes with the laws and the principles that have shaped today's
Internet, the Web is always going to be something that we build together.
Blogs were the first building blocks in that project. And I think they're still among the
most useful.
So thank you. My blog is at wordyard.com. The book has a Web site. And I'd love to
take some questions.
[applause]
>>: I'm curious about your thoughts on the evolution of the interactivity of blogs. I
know that when I started blogging, Blogger didn't have comments, they didn't exist, you
had to use little third-party Widgets. And initially it was seen as this radical thing that
you could have comments on your blog, and now there are people who say it's not a blog
unless you have comments.
So I'm curious kind of during your research what you found in terms of that evolution of
the role that interactivity and commenting played in blogging.
>>: Yeah. Before, I think the earliest real comment sections on blogs started around
2001. Before that, I think the notion was that the blog was a personal site and there
would be a conversation but the conversation would be happening between blogs. You
would post, you'd link to someone, they'd comment by linking back to you.
And there are still bloggers, some of them extremely high-profile ones -- Glenn
Reynolds, Instapundit, is one of the most popular conservative political bloggers and to
this day he doesn't have comments.
So I don't actually think of it as a part of the core definition of blogging. But it's clearly
considered one of the most important traits -- one of the most important add-ons you can
have today.
And there was also a sort of evolution of how bloggers thought about comments, because
at the beginning, some of the earliest bloggers shared some of the sort of idealistic view
of an even earlier era on the Internet that they should never delete a comment; that you
were interfering with someone's free speech if you deleted a comment.
Of course, the rise of spam comments and things like that, you're going to have to start
deleting anyway. And at a certain point I think it became obvious that you weren't
interfering with someone's free speech by deleting their comment, because they had
many, many places on the Web that they could express themselves, including starting
their own blog for free.
And once people got more comfortable with the idea of moderating their own comments,
that the blog was sort of their space and you would open it up for conversation to
commenters, but you were also going to sort of establish some rules and whatever your
rules were you were going to enforce, that made it possible really for bloggers of many
different approaches and philosophies to adapt the comments to their needs.
And today it -- you know, if you were starting a blog today without comments, people
would be looking at you think you know what's up, and you'd have to explain it to them if
you had a good reason.
>>: Two questions. One is in your research have you found out or did you arrive at a
nomenclature of the different categories of bloggers, kind of known as active bloggers or
casual bloggers [inaudible].
The second question is how do you see Twitter and this whole concept of [inaudible]
microblogging. Do you see that as an extension of blogging or an enhancement of
blogging, or do you see all blogging sites also having that as an ingredient?
>> Scott Rosenberg: So as far as nomenclature, I think it's not in my nature to be a
classifier, so I haven't really done the whole sort of breakdown of different blogging
types.
There have been efforts over the years -- you know, there used to be the -- Open
Directory Project used to have all sorts of, you know, tree-like structures defining
different groups of blogs. That's -- I don't know if that's up-to-date anymore. And so I
haven't really done that.
There are lots of different, you know -- if you look, poke around, you'll find people who
are obsessively categorizing blogs out there. But it's not really part of what I tried to do.
Twitter is obviously on everyone's mind right now. It's been a huge sensation. There's
something ironic to me because I did a lot of reading in my research for the book of the
early days of Blogger, and Evan Williams who started Blogger is also the CEO of Twitter
and one of the key people in its development.
And if you look at those early Blogger blogs, they were short, one-line posts, sometimes
they were about what they were up to and sometimes they were links. And when you
look at those pages, they look remarkably like a Twitter page today.
So in one way, Twitter is sort of a return to a particular style of blogging that was popular
in the early adopters of Blogger.
How it's affecting blogging I think is very positively. There was always this complaint
about bloggers that we often heard from critical people in the media saying who wants to
know what you're having for lunch, you know, why are you telling me this on your blog.
Well, now they get to ask that question about Twitter.
People who are posting that kind of thing are probably going to do it today on Twitter or
on a Facebook up date or something like that because it just makes more sense. The
people who you want to reach with that kind of message are likely to be tuned in on a
network like that.
So blogs have been sort of redefined or repositioned a little bit by the rise of these new
services to be more substantial. A blog today is more likely where you're going to put a
longer idea that you want to develop, record an experience that you want to remember
later. And so blogging has actually been made I think a little smarter by Twitter.
>>: [inaudible]
>> Scott Rosenberg: More well defined ->>: [inaudible]
>> Scott Rosenberg: You know, we see this in the history of media. When a new
medium arrives, it almost never kills off the medium that preceded it. You know,
television didn't kill off radio, movies didn't kill off live theater. These forms still exist.
But the new medium redefines the old and actually helps -- in many cases helps us find
what its essence is, and I think that's what's happened.
Yes.
>>: What role do you see now and in the future audio and video playing into blogging?
>> Scott Rosenberg: Audio and video are obviously, you know, everywhere now.
They've been -- thanks to developers who made it really easy to put things on blogs that
have sound or video. There was a period when it seemed like there was going to be this
different -- you know, we would have these different development paths of text blogging,
video blogging, audio blogging or podcasting. And now it seems much more like what
we have are streams of content from people. And some people like me are more text
oriented, so we'll just write, and other people, you know, mix it up and put a lot of video
on.
And I see it all kind of being this one undifferentiated mass of stuff that people are
posting in reverse chronological order.
The focus of Say Everything is mostly on text because that's really where it started. But I
don't see it as being fundamentally different in that sense.
There is this whole other phenomenon of sometimes called lifecasting where people are
sort of indiscriminately turning on a stream of audio or video from their lives and finding
a way to put it on the Web. And that's a -- it's a fascinating idea. It has all sorts of I think
huge pitfalls that we're going to discover as more people adopt this.
It's less appealing to me or doesn't seem as ultimately valuable because I think that any
kind of blogging involves selectivity. You're picking out something specific, you're
highlighting it, you're saying this is the moment that I want to remember or that I want to
tell you about.
And when you abandon that, you sort of get into this area that I -- you know, makes me
think of [inaudible] stories in which the map -- the representation is the same size as the
thing being represented. And that sort of gives me a headache and I don't want to think
about it.
Over there.
>>: I know a company like ours, we use blogging a lot for evangelism and community
and stuff like that. Did you take a look at it on how marketers are using blogging to help
drive additional sales?
>> Scott Rosenberg: Yeah. Marketers have obviously been paying really close attention
to blogging from early on. I wrote in the book a little bit about The Cluetrain Manifesto
which came along about 10 years ago and was this sort of blast of the trumpet in the
marketing world saying we need to use more authentic voices and we can't be speaking in
this impersonal way that our industry has gotten into.
And I think that the bloggers who are using marketing effectively are -- marketers who
are using blogging effectively are finding ways to do it within the context of something
that is still primarily personal. They're saying, you know, here I am, here's what I'm up
to, here are the things that I'm curious about, here's what I want to tell you about, what
I'm excited about.
They're not sort of doing it institutionally. When you do it institutionally, too often you
end up with something that is almost just like a series of press releases on a blog, and that
doesn't really serve anyone's purpose. You might as well just have the old-fashioned
page press releases.
How are we on time?
>> Kim Ricketts: We've got about eight more minutes.
>> Scott Rosenberg: Oh, great. Okay.
>>: I'm curious about demographics of bloggers, especially the age cohort. Is it shifting?
Are bloggers now -- as microblogging has risen, are they -- the text bloggers, more
substantive bloggers tending to get older? Or are new people coming in also taking up
blogging?
>> Scott Rosenberg: Yeah. The demographics I think haven't changed that much. It's
always been something that skewed a little bit more to the people in their 30s and 40s,
well educated, more often white than not. Well split between gender after the earliest
days when it was pretty heavily tech oriented, and there it was much more male
dominated.
I think clearly the energy of college-age people and early 20s at this point is much, much
more focused on Facebook and MySpace and social networks, but this is constantly in
flux. I haven't studied this stuff as closely as some people you may know, like Danah
Boyd, but my sense is that that cohort is pretty fickle; that MySpace I think has lost some
caché. Facebook now that the grown-ups are there. You know, younger people are
looking at it and saying is this where I want to be.
So long term I think what you can say with certainty is that young people will be moving
quickly, exploring new forms all the time.
But I think, and this is just a hunch, that just as with older media, you know, people who
weren't reading -- until this most recent generation, people who weren't reading
newspapers as young people would pick up that habit has they got older. I think that
we'll see that with blogs because people have a need as their lives move on to master a
subject or to go deep into something, whether it's related to their job or something; that
they really have an urgent need in their life to get beyond what they can get from the
mass media.
And I think that that need isn't going to go away, and so people will continue to
contribute in that way.
In back.
>>: So in your research, have you looked outside of the U.S. and really looked at reasons
why blogging has been adopted in certain regions of the world but not in others?
>> Scott Rosenberg: So outside the U.S.? I made a pretty conscious choice. I had a year
to write this book and do all the research and write it all. And I knew I wanted to tell the
story from the early days which were mostly in the U.S. as far as I know and was able to
tell.
And at a certain point, I sort of said to myself, you know, I'm going to go deep into the
stuff that I can and not try to cover the globe. And so I think that there is -- there are
incredible stories to tell. There are whole other books to be written about this subject in
other places around the world.
There's a writer I know named Cyrus Farivar who has a book coming out next year. It's
F-a-r-i-v-a-r. I think the title of his book is The Internet of Elsewhere. I may have that
wrong. Anyway, he has been research -- he's going to tell the story of the -- how the
Internet has affected -- he has four countries that are sort of test cases. And I think that
will be one great look at that subject.
Yes.
>>: I'm wondering, do you ever see blogging becoming more mainstream than it is now
or do you feel like it's somewhat saturated with the number of people that are using it? I
mean, as an example, you know, you mentioned Facebook is a form of blogging. Well,
at least at my college campus there, 90 percent of the population there have Facebook
accounts whereas maybe 10 percent or less have blogs.
Do you think blogging is going to increase as a phenomenon or is it at a point where it's
mature and sort of at a stale point?
>> Scott Rosenberg: That's hard to say. But I think it's probably had a -- hit a sort of
mature state and a plateau where people who are excited by this opportunity know that
it's free, know that it's there and will continue to step forward. I don't think it's going to
dip or disappear. But I don't know that it's going to grow the way it did in its early days.
It's a commitment to do a blog. Well, I mean, look at the numbers of abandoned blogs
out there. Lots of people start them and the opportunity cost is low. The threshold is
low. You know, you don't have to pay anyone to start a blog now the way you did in the
early days when you had to buy server space.
So it's there for people who want to do it. And Facebook is much less of a commitment
and Facebook has the incentive of, you know, all these other people who you're directly
connected to.
There is something in blogging. If you're not blogging as part of a specific community,
and there are -- those communities exist. There's one at Salon.com where I used to work
called Open Salon. And in that world you have a little bit of a social network and a little
bit of blogging kind of fused together. Or Vox is another service like that.
If you're not doing it in that kind of on text, it kind of is both thrilling and a little scary
because you're sort of out there on your own, you don't necessarily who's reading you.
Some people are excited by that, but a lot of people find that sort of like what's the point.
And those people are going to flock to Facebook or Twitter or something that actually
tells you, you know, you have X number of followers or friends.
Yes.
>>: So I'm a political candidate currently for [inaudible] political office, and there's kind
of an interesting perspective that my opponents have versus me. One of my opponents
has just a homepage and that's it created by a consulting firm and, you know, with very
little content on it. The other opponent has similar sort of homepage but is also on
Facebook and Twitter and regularly updates Twitter with roughly the same update each
day on the campaign trail.
And I don't do Facebook or Twitter. I have a blog. And I post some very in-depth
observations on what I think the state of the campaign is or what are the state of the
issues of the day. And then I have a homepage as well, made by me, not a political
consultant, with a lot of information that I've posted.
Am I doing things right as a political candidate or do I need to be on Facebook and
Twitter and updating every day or maybe every minute on the campaign trail?
>> Scott Rosenberg: Well, I'm wondering if I should charge you a consulting fee. But I
won't. I won't. I'm happy to give you my advice gratis.
I think that if you're a candidate, then your job is to find -- go where your constituents or
potential constituents are. And if I were doing it, I would -- I think having a blog as the
place where you can really go in depth on issues that you're focusing on, having that is
critical. And that gives you a leg up on your opponents.
But you also need to reach out on Twitter and on Facebook. Wherever the people in your
district are, you should be there. Now, you can be economical about how you do it. You
can -- I mean, I'd prefer Twitter to Facebook, so I have my Twitter updates also propagate
to Facebook. You can do things like that so it's just like take the legwork out of it if you
want.
But I would say do it. You know, don't cede that territory to your opponents.
>>: Thanks.
>> Kim Ricketts: I have a question. So it seems to me that there is -- there's an
authenticity component, almost an implied authenticity component in potential blogging
and microblogging. And so I'm a little -- the other day I met a woman who's a PR person
in Seattle and she said, oh, yeah, I'm Twittering as [inaudible] restaurant and as -- you
know, she was naming all these people that she's the Twitter voice for. And that just
struck me as kind of the opposite thing.
>> Scott Rosenberg: Well, you know, it depends. Twitter at this point is still so new that
people are experimenting with all sorts of uses for it.
It might be that somebody follows that restaurant. If the restaurant -- if it's the kind of
place that has daily specials and they just want to know what are the daily specials each
day, it's a way to subscribe and get that information. Or if the PR person for that
restaurant is letting people now about bargains or something, special deals.
And that's -- you know, that doesn't -- I mean, that's -- it's information that's of use to
someone; that those people have a convenient channel to receive it.
>>: It's not really a voice.
>> Scott Rosenberg: It's not a voice. No. And I don't know whether Twitter at this point
is quite as well developed the way -- you know, when we think of blogging, you wouldn't
probably -- you might do that on a blog, but you would look at the blog page and see, oh,
this person is using blog software to publish their daily specials; you wouldn't think of it
as being something that has an authentic voice of its own.
Don't forget, all of these things at bottom are just software tools, and those tools can be
used in tons of different ways. So I don't think that the tool itself conveys any particular
expectation about authenticity. Where you get that is in the community of usage that
forms around the tool. And with Twitter that community is certainly still evolving
rapidly.
On the aisle there.
>>: Just an observation to that. So a good friend of mine for a while worked for an SEO
company and actually was paid to write blogs that would incorporate links to various
products that they would work on. So and they've done the same thing with Twitter and
with Facebook, these various accounts that they have going on. And the whole point of it
is just SEO, you know, they're just propagating stuff.
But it's interesting because I read a lot of her blog posts and these different people. And,
you know, it's quite interesting because it's trying very hard to invoke the voice of the
individual users who's just using this awesome luggage and check it out, they have it on
sale over here for, you know, $99.99 in this spot. And it's an interesting -- it changed the
way that I started reading other blogs as well.
>> Scott Rosenberg: Was it transparent? Did you know when you landed on that blog
that this person was affiliated or had been ->>: Yeah, she told me where to look. And so ->> Scott Rosenberg: So it was there but it was buried?
>>: No, no, no. I mean, she said, oh, no, I wrote this. So I went to the blog and it turns
out that that blog -- and then she pointed to a few of her coworkers that also do this. And
they're paid by the word to write these long blogs that are marketing blogs. But they're
not transparently marketing blogs. They're written as sort of experiential, life ->> Scott Rosenberg: There is a -- you'll find people in the blog world and elsewhere who
are very upset by that development who feel that -- and some of whom blame Google and
say that, you know, by essentially monetizing the link, Google sort of undermined the
trust we place in the links that people are putting out there.
On the other hand, the fact that Google gave small publishers a way to monetize what
they did also fuelled a lot of the development of a lot of the best blogs out there.
So it's a tough situation. My feeling is that there's something -- certainly it's a gray area if
not outright unethical to not reveal that money was involved in, you know -- that you're
not just blogging something because you feel like it.
The FTC is beginning to get into this. I don't know, some of you may have seen the
coverage because it's pretty recent, there's this kind of whole subuniverse of female
bloggers, sometimes some of them proudly call themselves mommy bloggers. They
are -- you know, it's an amazing community of people sharing their personal experiences,
but also some of them beginning to make some money from what they do, because
marketing people and sponsors have found that if they can get these bloggers to
recommend their products it really helps sales.
And so there's a question of how much of that is actually being transparent.
There's a community of bloggers called BlogHer, B-l-o-g-H-e-r. They have a pretty good
set of standards and rules that they expect the people who are part of their network to
follow.
As a consumer, I tend to trust that. Also I'll say that if you're poking around the Web and
you find something that is driven by SEO, if you do a lot of reading online, you can have
pretty good antenna for that. You can really see -- you can see what's going on. And it's
writing that isn't really aimed at anyone reading it. It's writing that is aimed at Google's
algorithm or any other search algorithm that is going to find it and use it in that way.
>> Kim Ricketts: Maybe one more question.
>> Scott Rosenberg: Okay. One more. Yes. Thank you.
>>: This is actually related to the two previous questions. Given what's happening, then,
with some shifty antics, what do you think is the most successful formula for [inaudible]?
To provide information and not really be that personal or to have individuals who are
spokespeople for the corporation and passionate about the product [inaudible] identify
themselves? Where do you get that information [inaudible]?
>> Scott Rosenberg: So I think the more personal you can -- you know, within the
context of each corporation which is going to be different and, you know, different
companies have different cultures, the more personal you can make it, the better. The
more effective it will be.
It does mean that the person writing it has to be sensitive to the company's culture, has to,
you know, kind of walk a line. It's a balancing act between being honest and, you
know -- but if you're not, if it's really just a total impersonal voice, it's not really going to
be effective as a blog.
The stories that I tell in the book about Robert Scoble when he was here at Microsoft are
sort of the classic instance of that. I was his reader. He was out telling the world how
great Longhorn, which was what Vista was previously named -- how great Longhorn was
going to be, and all of these things. And then Longhorn got changed. All these things
that he had been telling us about were pulled out of the development cycle.
And he really -- to his credit, he basically said, you know, I blew it. I really don't have
any credibility on this anymore, so I'm going to shut up about it. And it was very
up-front. I read that and I thought, well, he's being honest about it.
You know, he's just one person at a large company that had to make some tough
decisions. And I gave him credit for that instead of if he had tried to, you know, kind of
do a dance around it with double-speak and, you know, things that you sometimes get
from a large company, I would have stopped reading him probably.
Well, thanks again. It was really fun.
[applause]