Over here, first, in this corner, we’ve got usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen is telling us that smart people will forget about blogging and write articles. Blogs, says Nielsen, are a dime a dozen. If you want to “demonstrate world-class expertise,” write long, in-depth articles that you can get people to pay for.

“Blog postings,” says Nielsen, “will always be commodity content: there’s a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else’s comments.” Note how the definition has shifted without notice: all blog posts have somehow become “short comments on somebody else’s comments.”

As the article continues, Nielsen explains that his advice is aimed at the person who wants to establish that he is the number-one expert among the thousand bloggers in a field. This quantitative focus is awfully crude: among 1000 specialists, who’s to say there is a “number one”? By what measure? You’re going to find a whole range of sub-specialists and eccentrics, deep-niche experts and synthesizing generalists. But Nielsen’s analysis is built around this sort of comparative ranking. He maintains that, since blog posts are so variable in quality, a blog will never do a good job of showcasing your expertise. If you want to be top dog, make sure your barks are long and full of detailed research.

But Nielsen’s tract isn’t actually about how to become a “world-class expert” or even how to broadcast one’s world-class-expert-hood. It’s about the most efficient way to get people to pay for your content. Nielsen starts from the assumption that your goal isn’t self-expression or persuasion or enjoyment or anything besides customer acquisition. People won’t pay for blogs; therefore, blogging is a waste of time.

But no blogger I’ve ever heard of has actually tried to charge for content (tip jars are the closest anyone’s come). No one seems to want to do so; it runs counter to blogging’s DNA. Long, in-depth articles are a wonderful thing; who would dismiss their value? But Nielsen blithely dismisses the value in 999 out of a thousand blogs. He doesn’t seem to understand that, most of the time, that value is created not in hope of finding paying customers but, simply, for love.

Now then: here, in the other corner, we have Marc Andreessen. He’s the guy who whipped up the first popular Web browser for personal computers. In 2003 he rashly dissed the need for blogging, saying, “I have a day job. I don’t have the time or ego need.”

But he’s come around, and in the past few weeks he’s poured a huge amount of thought and energy into an impressive new blog. Yesterday, in a post titled “Eleven lessons learned about blogging, so far,” Andreessen wrote, “It is crystal clear to me now that at least in industries where lots of people are online, blogging is the single best way to communicate and interact”:

Writing a blog is way easier than writing a magazine article, a published paper, or a book — but provides many of the same benefits.

I think it’s an application of the 80/20 rule — for 20% of the effort (writing a blog post but not editing and refining it the quality level required of a magazine article, a published paper, or a book), you get 80% of the benefit (your thoughts are made available to interested people very broadly).

Arguably blogging is better because the distribution of a blog can be even broader than a magazine article, a published paper, or a book, at least in cases where the article/paper/book is restricted by a publisher to a limited readership base.

Andreessen obviously isn’t writing his blog with any intent to try to charge people for it (as one of the founders of Netscape he presumably doesn’t need that kind of change). I doubt, either, that he is blogging in order to be known as the one-in-a-thousand expert on anything. So Nielsen would tell him, don’t bother — don’t waste your time.

Andreessen doesn’t look likely to heed such counsel. Certainly, as a tech-industry celebrity, he’s had it relatively easy in attracting attention and readers. But he’s hardly coasting. His posts, in fact, look suspiciously like the long, in-depth articles Nielsen advocates; they just happen to be posted in blog form.

From what I can tell, Andreessen is blogging because he finds it fun. Because it connects him to a wider group of people who share his interests. Because it gives him a chance to think out loud and tell war stories and give advice. And because, having started, he can’t stop writing (long, in-depth) posts.

It looks a lot like love.
[tags]jakob nielsen, marc andreessen, blogging[/tags]

This is getting interesting!

John Battelle has posted a reasonable defense of the Federated Media “conversational ad” scheme that I discussed earlier. (And it strikes a healthily non-defensive tone, too, which is awfully hard in such a situation.) He argues that he views “commercial publications” as conversations between three parties: authors, audiences and advertisers.

Well, OK. You know who the authors are; they sign their writing. You know who you are, as a member of the audience. But who, exactly, is the advertiser? That is the problem with Battelle’s formulation, as I see it.

Blogging presupposes a notion of direct communication between writer and reader, where there is no editor or intermediary bureaucracy between the two, and where the reader, as often as not, is also a blogger, ready to respond — to participate in the “conversation.”

But this advertiser-as-conversationalist thing, I’m still having a hard time with it. If you look at the “People Ready” conversation page that FM and Microsoft created, where, exactly, is Microsoft joining the conversation? I see lots of names here, but no name representing Microsoft. If you click through to the “About People Ready” page, you can read stuff like, “Microsoft sees a better way to unlock the potential of every person.” But, er, who exactly is Microsoft?

In a comment posted on Jeff Jarvis’s blog, Battelle elaborates:

Is it somehow illegal for companies to be part of a conversation? I really find that presumption offensive. Why can’t companies, which as the Cluetrain reminds us are just made up of people, be part of a conversation, and invite leader into that conversation?

I have only one problem with this argument: A corporation is not (pace the late 19th-century legal doctrine that held corporations to have the same rights as individuals) a person. There are plenty of individual people who work for corporations. (I do, too.) And when they post in online forums or start blogs or do anything that they sign their name to, I’m very happy to have a conversation with them. But that’s different from “companies being part of a conversation.” I don’t know how to do that. And I really don’t see that happening with the “People Ready” campaign.

A deep irony here is that Microsoft, of all the big tech companies, has a long and proud record of promoting blogging among its engineers and executives. I’ve learned a vast amount by reading them, and their presence online — including the famous Robert Scoble (who weighs in on this controversy here, and who of course has long since moved on from Microsoft) but extending far beyond him — has changed my understanding of the company and the people who work for it. Microsoft is already part of a panoply of real conversations on the Web. That makes this “People Ready” construct look all the more artificial.

UPDATE: More from Matthew Ingram:

If I’m talking to a bunch of people in a bar, and an advertising guy working for Coke comes up and tries to change the subject to the idea of “refreshment,” and says that he plans to tape-record my comments and use them on a billboard, then I am going to react pretty negatively to that idea. That’s not a “conversation” the way I would define it.

[tags]people ready, federated media, ethics, blogging[/tags]

In the murky annals of “advertorial” — the blurring of clear lines between independent editorial matter and advertising — the dustup over Federated Media’s campaign on behalf of Microsoft’s “People Ready” slogan will rank as a minor affair. But it’s a useful flashpoint for looking at a central divergence in perspectives on blogging.

Federated Media, John Battelle’s ad network for high-traffic blogs, gathered a constellation of star tech-and-biz pundits who are part of its network, got them to offer comments on the theme of Microsoft’s campaign, and assembled those quotes on a Web site. Valleywag cried foul. FM refers to the technique as a “conversational marketing campaign”; the approach is really the Web equivalent of a magazine advertorial. Advertorials — including advertorials that involve a publication’s editorial staff — have been around a long time, and while they can be abused, they are hardly cause for deep moral indignation, as long as they are clearly labeled (FM’s is) and not trying to confuse readers.

On the other hand, if you run advertorials, I think you make it much harder to present yourself as the leader of any kind of business revolution. When advertisers ask for an advertorial, they typically want to confuse readers; they’re admitting that traditional ads aren’t working for them, and they’re asking for the editors or bloggers to lend an ad a bit of the content producers’ credibility — or at least ability to attract readers’ attention. This is fundamentally an old-media game.

FM and others working at the edge of new-media business models argue that they’re helping advertisers and marketers “join a conversation.” Maybe so. But the best conversations aren’t plotted by ad buyers; they’re spontaneous.

Ironically, of course, it’s the conversation about this ad campaign (Mike Arrington defends the ad, Om Malik retreats from it, Dave Winer says the bloggers may be “clouding their integrity”) that is attracting multiple posts –including, yeah, this one — and landing the controversy at the top of sites like Techmeme. So maybe FM and Microsoft knew exactly what they were doing. Maybe Nick Denton and Valleywag are in on the deal, too! (No, no, of course not: joke.)

What I find interesting in this debate is that there remains, nearly a decade into the history of blogging, a philosophical divide: Some see blogging as simply a young format for media business — and, like Federated Media or Valleywag’s owner Gawker Media, building ad-based publications on blogging platforms. Others stubbornly continue to see blogging as a uniquely new creative endeavor that puts bloggers in direct touch with readers, cutting out media-biz middle-manning. Anyone in the latter camp is going to squawk at the arrival of the blog-advertorial — not only because it’s corrupt to them, but because it’s old hat.

The people at Federated Media are smart, and I’ll give them credit for trying out new ad approaches in a not-obviously-corrupt way. If this one doesn’t work, I’m sure they’ll keep trying. But I’m skeptical of the introduction of what are, essentially, magazine-biz norms into the blogosphere. Because eventually that road ends with blogs becoming independent online magazines, and I’ve been at that game long enough to know how hard it is.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis — whose blog is repped by Federated Media — weighs in at length, concluding:

It’s the bloggers who must make these calls. That’s because advertisers will be advertisers; they will try to push for more integration with us (and we should beware taking that as flattery). And sales people will be sales people; they will try hard to get the sale. So we bloggers are left, inevitably, with the need to say no.

[tags]federated media, advertorial, microsoft, people powered, blogging[/tags]