Danah Boyd puts the frustrations, sorry, challenges, we face every day in trying to bring the benefits of blogging to companies into words.

What is special (and magnificently more frustrating) about blogs is that they stem from many metaphors, including newspapers/magazines, journals/diaries, and log notebooks. No wonder people are up in arms screaming that it’s not like a newspaper, it's like a diary! or vice versa. They're both right and wrong. If you're stuck in a metaphoric understanding of blogging, the conflicting metaphors are problematic and discount your approach to the system.

Explaining blogs to people who never heard of them or only know them within particular and narrow context, such as journal blogs or political commentary blogs, is sometimes very hard indeed. This is because there are two aspects to a blog - the format & style and the social network. The first includes format features such as permalink, trackback, comments, blogroll, archives etc and the second is the blogosphere. The latter follows from the former and therefore we believe that it is possible to define a blog at least in a sort of minimalist fashion.

As a rule of thumb, we say that if you cannot link to individual articles, it is not a blog. Permalink rules. Otherwise, the format is that of a blog, at the most rudimentary level. There is a lot more to the blog format, of course, but that is the minimum. The trick is to explain just how the particular format features and other blog functionality such as RSS gave rise to the blogosphere phenomenon and to many other aspects of online communication. Most people tend to judge a new medium according to the old one it may be vaguely replacing, no matter how different the new medium actually is. It takes time for them to see the full extend of the difference.

Now that most people are on email, it is rare to have to explain that form. But when people were starting up, it was confusing. My grandparents thought that i couldn’t write because my emails were strewn with spelling errors, lacked capitalization and were often fragments. Nowadays, they get it because they get that email is different than letters.

We often talk amongst ourselves how many people don't 'get' blogs and internet. It is hard to explain what exactly that it is and we are working on it, since we do want to avoid looking like a bunch of cliquey teenagers. But it's good to see Danah using the same point.

With blogging and YASNS, people haven't "gotten it" yet. Even many of the people creating these technologies still think that they're building out the metaphors. Of course, if they stay trapped in the metaphor, they're doomed to failure. It is crucial to understand that YASNS and blogs are different than their metaphoric precursors.

I agree with Danah's conclusion - the best solution is to be a practitioner. It shows you a different perspective on things that you can certainly grasp intellectually but their long term effect or the impact on a particular individual needs sometimes to be experienced to be believed. That is why social software, networking and other emergent technologies and phenomena have a hard time demonstrating tangible impact.

This is precisely why it's bloody hard to study/discuss these technologies without being a practitioner. Distance is valuable as a researcher, but it's also limiting. You need to engage with the culture at a deep level in order to study it. Because digital technology cultures are so peculiar, you need to be involved at an intimate level. Being a lurker is just not the same. It is the practice of engaging with these technologies that makes you able to move beyond the metaphor.

I think that the kind of communications and social interaction that digital technology has enabled so far is in its infancy. To me it's self-evident that the long-term impact of all this on the way people interact, ideas are generated and disseminated will be enormous, we are seeing only the second wave of the social impact of such technology. Or more like 1.2 wave.

I have to confess to using a metaphor when it comes to blogs too, albeit a defensive one. Whenever people say that blogging will not amount to much because there are just sooo many bad and pointless blogs, I like to ask them back that just because there are a vast number of trashy books, printing press is not such an impressive invention after all. Something tells me that Guttenberg must have heard the argument...

The good news, at least you can't 'burn' blogs... well, not yet at any rate.

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