Here I’ll set up some background for a future post on Blog as Personal Learning Environment and also reply to Jim Lee’s post at APQC’s Knowledge Management blog, where he said:
Blogs as discussion forums and discussion forums as blogs? Well, discussion forums have so much over blogs that if you want to use the discussion forum device and call it a blog, I’d be very happy. Down with blogs, long live the discussion forum!
This field had been plowed before, so before I add my own voice, I wanted to summarize a sample of what others have already said…
Back in August 2004, Lee LeFever wrote a thoughtful comparison in What are the Differences Between Message Boards and Weblogs?, which he introduced with:
I believe that weblogs and message boards *are* different — different enough to happily exist together in the same online community web site. My conclusion is that online communities will use the two resources to fill two different roles. Their ability to fill independent niches will make the subtle differences between them make more sense.
Lee also did a lighter piece ten months later in A Blog Post Says “Here It Is, Dig It”. Excerpts:
- Comment implies “if you want, not requiredâ€
- Reply implies “I’m not done until you do.â€
- A blog has readers
- A message board has lurkers
- A blog is all about ME
- A message board is all about US
- When things go quiet on a blog, the onus is on one person
- When things go quite on a message board, the onus is on everyone
I don’t see that all that much has changed in the two and a half years since Lee’s original post and there is still a lot of confusion as represented by these next two samples:
Paul Fender in Blog vs. Discussion Board said:
My experience, thus far, has been that blogging is a very blogger-centric way to communicate where the blogger puts stuff out there – pretty free form – and any comments or discussion around that thought aren’t really facilitated very well. Certainly, as far as a dialogue goes, blogging just isn’t there. …Well, on Threaded Discussion Boards, I’ve seen raging dialogue take place. They just feel much more, uh, community-oriented… (December 2006)
Tony Karrer in Blogs vs. Discussion Groups or Mis-Understanding Blog Reading and Blog Communities spoke about common misconceptions about the blogging community. He introduced the list with:
What’s been most enlightening for me is the “bad rap” that blogging gets from people who’ve probably only visited a few blogs and have been inundated with a general media bias against blogging. (October 2006)
Bringing in a slightly different angle on this, I like the summary that Dave Wilcox did in Groups vs. networks … forums vs. blog communities where he concluded with:
All of this confirms to me that attempts to promote collaboration can’t be either/or in the approach or media. Some people will prefer groups (forums), others will prefer blogs and networks, just as some like text, others audio or video. The challenge is to (of course) be clear on what you are trying to achieve with whom, and then be prepared to use a mix of methods over time.
A few of my own thoughts:
- The organizing element for blogs is the person, the blogger. The organizing element for discussion groups or mailing lists is the subject (the thread) and the overall discussion topic.
- With this, blogs have a strong personal brand. I view this as an e-portfolio or self-published column. Others may choose to see as ego.
- Blogs encourage (but don’t always receive) more reflection than the typical discussion forum or mailing list post. Again, closer to a newspaper or magazine column, than a live conversation.
- In my own limited experience, blogs are more likely to attract deeper personal connections that go beyond knowing somebody only as their userid. I’ve had this experience inside the firewall as well as now increasingly outside.
- Blogs move at a bit of a slower pace. Perhaps the distinction between conversation late into the evening at the pub versus the quick exchange in hallway of the workplace.
- Blogs encourage and allow for more creativity. For example, I like photos, and although I’m not much of a photography now days…this blog gives me the opportunity to express that — as I just did above.
Circling back to the Enterprise setting…
- Given the above, do blogs have a role in the enterprise distinct from discussion groups/forums or mailing lists?
- Do corporations need deeper reflection by their employees, more creativity, and stronger human networks?
My answer to both questions is ‘yes’. Pushing myself on the (for me) tougher question of does it then follow that there should be inside the firewall blogging, distinct from employees externally blogging? I still come down to a cautious ‘yes’. With this I share two visions I have that I hope to see first-hand or hear about soon:
- A soon to retire senior designer sharing his or her observations, opinions, tips and techniques in a series of blogs that not only pass on their experience, but also serves as a way to celebrate and honor their career in a more personal way than trying to extract to an impersonal “knowledge” repository.
- A CEO using the blog format to write about the possibilities they see for the company and calling forth action.
Photo Credit: kalyana sundaram
Ray: I haven’t followed the links in this post yet, but I have some thoughts to add to yours. I agree with every distinction you draw between discussion groups and blogs. I also draw the line between the two as outgrowths of different technologies: email newsletters and vanity websites respectively. I suspect there may even be distinctions between POP subscriptions to a list and RSS subscriptions to many blogs — that get reflected in the different kinds of communities and contributions to their participants.
In my extensive experience with discussion groups (1997-98), I found listservs were very attractive to newbies and wanna bees. Most subscribers were too new to even formulate questions that would further their understanding. Thus, they were very dependent on those few subscribers who could pose a problem, ask a question, challenge the advice or compare two approaches. Each listserv also had a few cognoscenti who answered the queries, pointed to other resources and raised the tone to a level of acceptance, gratitude and community. Meanwhile, each list would routinely descend to the lowest common denominator – the tone set by the newbies. There would be outbreaks of powerlessness: paranoia, catastrophizing, commiserating and flaming. The few discussion groups I joined last year to investigate Second Life suggest that “nothing has changed”.
Most of the listservs I joined positioned me as one of the cognoscenti very quickly. I would then be reading countless emails by subscribers with rudimentary or no understanding of the topics. With so many contributors to the discussion threads, only cursory impressions were made of individual subscribers. Blogging is very different from all that. Newbies may subscribe to my blog, but I don’t subscribe to theirs and I suspect many do not blog themselves. I am reading almost no blog writing that embodies powerlessness. I only encounter “whining” rarely in the comments on a collective blog like the Learning Circuits one or blogs with vast comments like Creating Passionate Users or Terra Nova. I am reading the blogs of other cognoscenti. I’m getting rich impressions of each blogger I subscribe to and read regularly. The value of those blogs to my own personal learning, growing, changing and creating — is phenomenal. My writing of blog postings is very similar to the writing I have done for discussion groups. Thus my outputs are similar in discussion groups and blogs, but my inputs are very different.
Of course, I see these differences in terms of The Long Tail and The Starfish and the Spider. Discussion groups provide centralized expertise from the cognoscenti at the top. They deliver a mass merchandising of content to all the subscribers who are unavoidably dependent on the few factories that crank out solutions, answers and guidance. The subscribers consequently exhibit a lack of initiative, open source contributing and leaderless investment in the common good (implied by your term: lurkers). Blogging among us cognoscenti is long tailed, creating for a few passionate subscribers who are equally articulate, creative and actively engaged in personal development. The dynamics of blogging communities are self-organizing, regenerative and inter-dependent due to the lack of centralized, command & controls. The onus on individual bloggers is to express and share oneself like bands and filmmakers, not to keep a discussion thread going like dinner guests and committee members.
Take care
Tom
Hi Tom,
Thanks for taking the time to share this deeply. Everything you say rings true to me and helps me understand better why I get so turned off and frustrated with the relatively few external mailing lists I still subscribe to.
What I now wonder about is the translation of your comment to INSIDE the firewall.
My experience in our own (Novell’s) internal mailing lists has been that they have a different characteristic to them than the external lists…although I’m feeling challenged just now to pin-point. Perhaps it is as simple fewer newbies and more tolerance for those that are.
As you likely picked up on, in the post I was dodging the ‘threaded discussion forum’ versus pure listserve debate that is an interesting study in its own right…although I believe the difference between these two forms is small compared to the delta to the blog form.
Be well,
Ray
I have to agree with Tom’s assessment on this. From a pure learning point of view, I have gained far more from my blogging experience than I ever did from list participation. That “lowest common denominator” thing has always killed really learning for me. I think that what people miss in looking at blogs is that conversations happen BETWEEN bloggers, not just in comments, but more so through posting and via email. These are deeper, richer conversations to me, with much greater reflection going on. I’ve also found bloggers to be far more thoughtful and respectful of differences of opinion and much more willing to explore ideas without getting into the sniping and flaming that I see so often on lists. For me, blogging has been a powerful way to deepen my own learning and professional practice.
Ray
As I’ve thought through the potential differences created by groups inside the firewall, nothing seems to hold up as a valid distinction to me.
1. It’s possible there would be a moderating effect on flaming, to be in personal contact through shared physical locations, but that does not seem to dampen the backstabbing, rumors and paranoid speculations in an office grapevine.
2. It’s possible there would be more voices of expertise, competence and coaching others — in an employment context, but high turnover or rapid growth negate that and make it possible to replicate the deluge of newbies outside the firewall.
3. It’s possible for the topics to be more focused and practical given the project, customer or bottom-line accountability behind the firewall, yet many discussion groups focus on very specific issues and eliminate deviant discourse on their lists.
4. It’s possible that posts inside the firewall could resemble memos with the use of an impersonal business voice — since personal communication is possible F2F, but most external tech support lists also drop out revealing, emotional, and admiring comments.
5. It’s possible for discussions inside the firewall to occur among fewer people with everyone participating (no lurkers) and be more like my experience of blogging, but external lists achieve that feeling when there are no questions, problems or issues for the cognoscenti to respond to, so the elite do all the discussing among themselves.
Tom
Ray, distinct from the role of blogs in learning and in facilitating discussion, deeper reflection, etc. I suggest there is a, perhaps obvious, reasons blogs matter inside the firewall: blogging is easier than page authoring and automatically extends “page” content to newer dynamic vehicles like RSS/Atom. In other words, blogs matter inside the firewall because they make more sense than Frontpage or Notepad for putting even simple static content online. The catch is that the “me” that these kinds of blogs are about may be a proxy for a product, line of business, horizontal process or business model. This is similar to your thinking that a CEO using a blog to share a common vision with the employees is a good use case. There are micro versions of this scenario up and down the organization where the business goal is communication, not collaboration.
Michele: Thanks for the comment and further confirmation.
Tom: Always good to hear from you.
Scott: Good point. My first thought was “use a wiki with RSS/Atom enabled watch list” to achieve same; however, on a bit deeper reflection I’m seeing benefits of blog platform for these Use Cases over either wiki or discussion group. Thanks for adding the additional insight. BTW, great Saint Thomas photos at your site. I haven’t been down there in many many years and the photos make me want to go back.