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18 Dec 2005
People are amazing
Paul Kedrosky had a very negative post on structured blogging. He thinks that the average person will not start structured blogging. He finds that people are lazy. He has a very techno utopian view in that algorithms should save us. So the question is what the impact of structured blogging will be?
The problem with his post is that people are indeed lazy. But people are only lazy towards things that do not interest them. There is an analysis on communities somewhere (I am to lazy to go find it), which shows that some 80% of people are lurkers, some 15% are occasional contributors and some 5% are really the core of a community (correct my numbers please). So the number of people who actually contribute are very small indeed. Just check out any community where content is produced (WikiPedia, Amazon reviews, Wondir, etc.). And more MicroContent related examples can be found in del.icio.us, Google Maps/Earth, Flickr. But the content that is produced in those communities is very valuable.
So Structured Blogging will help the small community of authors to publish the MicroContent types that they are interested in. Structured Blogging will help any creator/author/intitaive to get his/her interests out. There are so many people in my surroundings who are active organising something. Structured Blogging might help them to get the word on their events out in the world, to allow them to meet more like-minded people. And these people are hardly Internet users, but if they can meet more like-minded people, which help them survive their activity, they will be interested in Structured Blogging. One should look further than Internet and look into the real world with activities like cooking, knitting and coming together. An advantage in Structured Blogging will lie there. But to help there specific solutions are needed, specific MicroContent Types are needed.
If I was what is organised and done around me, I find it amazing. And they do not need Internet at all. However a bit of Structured Blogging might help them survive doing what they like best. Let's help people doing amazing things.