One of the first things I wanted to do post-Cisco is start a new blog. Not a blog about myself, one geared more towards entrepreneurs.
However, in the process of planning this, I realized that the concept of a blog as it exists today is outdated. The idea of a blog is firmly rooted in about the year 2000, and it's getting long in the tooth.
As a content producer I don't want a standalone site, an Island on the Internet, I want a site that participates on the social Web. And more importantly, I want a site that is laser-focused on getting people to take the action that I want them to take, whether that's subscribing to the blog, download an e-book, clicking an affiliate link, whatever the goal of the site is.
In the process of sketching out what this sort of site would look like, I realized that there a bunch of ideas about what blogs are and how they operate that are completely outdated. For example:
- RSS is not mainstream–never has been and probably never will be–and it is not an effective way to distribute information because of that. Email is much more effective, and social networks are even more effective. So why distract and confuse uninterested users with this highly geek-oriented technology? Social Web-based distribution models (and even email) are much more effective.
- Coupling an information site with a customer management system such as a CRM system is a no-brainer. Track visitors as much as you can until they identify themselves to you, and then pounce on that opportunity to make the experience as rich and meaningful to them as possible, and keep a history of your interaction with them. There are no mainstream blogging products that are focusing on this.
- Why shouldn't a blog have its own identity online? Ultimately a blog seeds an online conversation and then acts as the center/aggregator for responses to the post from around the Web. While blogs have gotten slightly better at sucking responses in from around the Web, they suck at pushing responses back out. A blog should connect conversations and people–it is in fact a community. It took years of blogging to figure this bit out.
- Blogs are very un-realtime. In this day and age collaboration is not just nice to have, it's a necessity. Sometimes going back to a writing a blog post like this feels very old-fashioned, simply because I have to wait until it's done, published, distributed, and read before anyone can give me feedback on it. Blogs need to catch up to the real-time conversation game, IMO this will function something like Google Wave, but look completely different.
- There is no awareness of what is inside the blog or the post. Context-awareness is a requirement for any collaboration tool anymore (which blogs are a rudimentary form of). When you have to tag posts yourself to give them any semblance of context, and then those don't update as the conversation evolves, that just doesn't cut it.
While some of these things can be cobbled together from various plugins and third parties, that does not result in a very cohesive platform. And I've never seen a blog or site that I thought addressed all of these issues well.
I also do not like Javascript hack-ons. They not only detract from the speed of the site and the user experience, add-ons like Disqus (what I'm using right now) deprive the site of Google juice from the comments. Google has said that they're ranking sites higher that load faster, and yet Google Analytics itself is guilty of making pages take seconds longer to load. Seems like it has to be baked into the platform if you want to avoid being penalized, no?
Thoughts? Does anything that satisfies these requirements exist?
