Mixing categories

David Hornik published an opinion piece in Cnet on blogging and social software. The piece is mainly on social software and not so much on blogging. I am not sure why both service categories have been put together. I would rather see them discussed separately, although I admit that there are interesting relationships.

I see blogs and its derivatives mainly as enabling services, which allow anyone to publish content. The emphasis lies on the ease of publishing and publish formats.

What happens next is aggregation and networking. Putting all this separate content together in a single service and creating something new. David Hornik defines Social Software as Broadly speaking, social software is just software that facilitates the communications among people, which is a good definition. As he says, it is nothing new. Go back to Usenet and you have the first roots. I believe the value is in aggregation and not in networking, but it is a question of definitions. I rather have a better definition, then we will also have a better grasp of what is happening.

[inspiration Marc Canter]