May 25, 2010
Tonight I was reading a post at Slashdot entitled “Rise of the Professional Blogger“. One user commented that he is disappointed with forum websites essentially handing over control of entire online communities for a price, directly profiting from archived user contributions–where the goal is financial and personal gain for the owner, rather than the community–but in the context of his post he appears to be blaming professional bloggers for being too greedy.
It seems to me, there are more websites now with the intention of making money than with the intention of fostering a community.
What this Slashdot contributer fails to realize is that blogging is the *beginning* of the very solution to this problem–the “community” is the entire internet now and that is why I am commenting on this topic at my own blog, and not at Slashdot.
Reasons why you should not contribute to online community forums:
- You lose control of your content. In most cases you can’t go back and edit your content. In fact, the sysop of the community even has the option of altering your content without your permission, and may additionally mirror your content at other URL locations without your permission. Very often you won’t be able to remove your content either, for obvious reasons. For example: Slashdot won’t allow you to delete your account.
- The sysop of the community may use your content to sell products or services that you do not endorse. Imagine you are posting a message at your favorite forum–a forum you enjoy and trust–today. What happens if next year, ads are inserted into the forum archives, alongside your content–ads that you may find deceptive or offensive? What can you do? In most cases, nothing. What happens if the forum is sold to someone else? Again, offensive ads or links could be inserted into your content.
- Another problem with ads on forums: the ads you see aren’t necessarily the ads that everyone else sees. Due to user profiling, which is very common now–you never know what ads are being displayed alongside your content. Example: a woman posts some information in an online forum–she may see ads in her post that target women, then a man reads the same post and finds a very different ad. This is what Myspace.com does. Remember, most online community forums know your age, your sex, and probably a lot more.
- Here is another scenario: The forum or community goes offline, a server crashes, a host can’t pay its bandwidth bill–you get the idea–all your content can disappear–*poof* This can happen with forums and with blogs. Imagine if you had a free blog somewhere, with years and years of posts–then your blog is lost or deleted, accidentally or otherwise. Don’t think it can’t happen–it does, and you can almost count on it. Just when you think you’ve heard it all, there’s some new calamity that no one anticipated. Here’s a case in point: one of the largest datacenters in the world–Equinix–they have 50,000 gallons of fuel in Chicago and two gigantic diesel generators to power the webservers in case of an emergency–power went out, the system shortcircuited and the generators were useless. No matter how much planning goes into these systems, it’s only a matter of time before something goes wrong–it might be as simple as a flood or someone walking off with the server in the middle of the night. Also remember, eBay went offline for an entire day and the engineers later admitted that all the data was nearly lost–it can happen to anyone. If you are going to invest time on the internet, why not nurture that investment–why not protect it?
- You lose control over user comments. When you publish content at your own blog you can moderate the comments. When you publish content at a private forum you have no control over what is said about you, and you may not even see what is being said about you, as the forum software can easily block your access. Also remember, with a blog you can control the pace of published feedback/comments, whereas with a forum there’s no telling what can happen when you aren’t sitting at the PC monitoring discussion.
Blogs are replacing forums for all of the above reasons, and as blog technology advances, people will spend more time posting in their own blogs, and less time posting in forums where they have no control. At the moment, forums may seem more interactive, but blogs are quickly taking over by adding new features, and, as we can see with a FOAF-based blogging system like Myspace, there is room for even more advancement.
As you can see–it is in your best interest to own your own domain, and publish your own blog. The function of the blog now, and into the future, is to interact with other blogs, essentially eliminating the need for single-domain forums/communities. The Internet then becomes the community. You can take the easy route and jump on a free blogging system, but be forewarned: you have no control over the content or the ads! It is best to register your own domain where you control the content, and if you want ads, you can choose ads that you endorse. Independent blogs are not endangering community online–in fact they aim to protect *the* online community–the Internet.
every 10069s, 1s ago, in 0.01s.
