BuzzMachine

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

Yet more on AOL blogs

2 comments on Yet more on AOL blogs

Yet more on AOL blogs
: Clay Shirky has posted his reaction to the AOL blogging demo.

Clay focuses on the community-vs-publishing models of blogging as if that were still an open question at AOL. From what I saw, there’s no question mark there; AOL is starting with the community (LiveJournal) model. That may be a smart start, considering AOL’s roots, but if that’s where they stop, that will be a big mistake.

: Not surprisingly, my Technorati link cosmos exploded with lots of new links to Buzzmachine because of the AOL report. Surprisingly, the traffic itself did not take a corresponding jump. A single Instapundit link garner more. Not sure what the reason is: Perhaps Doc Searls is right: We’re just getting tired of blogging about blogging.

2 responses to “Yet more on AOL blogs”

  1. Clay Shirky Avatar
    Clay Shirky

    My guess is that the traffic is low because the big news — AOL is going to launch a weblogging product — is in the title, and having taken that in, people don’t need to see the backstory.

  2. Clay Shirky Avatar
    Clay Shirky

    …oh, and:
    Community vs publishing *is* an open question at AOL, because setting the big direction (clearly at the LJ end of things right now) does not force all the thousands of little decisions they still have to make. What they do about comments alone (default on or off, whats the unit, the blog or the post, etc) will have a huge impact.
    Furthermore, the decision about whether to integrate the weblgo product with the personal homepages will also say alot about their attitude towards publishing and community.