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Recent posts, such as this one by KC Jones on TechWeb talk about a peak in blogging, implying that blogging is going to peak and then die down. Now it is hardly surprising that the blog market would grow more slowly as it gets bigger. Additionally, the participation percentages, that seem to contribute to the "end of blogging as we know it" tone were actually pretty good. For instance, 2% regular contributors and 10-15% occasional contributors is actually better than most "historic" online communities where, as Jakob Nielsen, says

90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action. (found on Tiara.org)

So this makes the blogosphere look pretty healthy, at least relative to other forms of online community. The flurry of articles on this made our own Elizabeth Book say:

I think collaborative communities that support virtual conferences for real business reasons, like Second Life, are going to start replacing blogs, but I think blogs still serve a very important purpose for thought leadership in specialized industries like ours. I don't think that good blogs, and people who excel at the blogging medium, are going away anytime soon.

Now as I recently participated in a tour of IBM's new island in Second Life, this made me think - did I see anything there that would replace my use of blogs or that I could even imagine doing so. Blogs are an asynchronous collaborative media where someone has knowledge or opinions they wish to share and through which they can engage a community in discussion. They are not tools for virtual conferences, interactivity etc. Places like Second LIfe, however, are designed for real-time interaction between people. Geographic distance might have been eliminated but the need to be present in time has not. On the other hand the overhead in transmitting know-how to an audience in SL should not be underestimated. Despite the significant effort IBM had put into their island, it was time consuming to learn very much about their technology. With the limitations in the technology today, a very limited experience is possible (recorded video/audio or typed messages and graphics). Attempts, like those in the Circuit City virtual store, to let you manipulate products through your avatar seemed clunky and would not give any sense of the design benefits or problems inherent in the product in RL (real life).

Before I write the whole thing off, though, I should not a recent statistic showing that 75% of adults prefer email to IM while 75% of teens prefer IM to email. Clearly my kids are growing up in a more synchronous world and prefer it to the asynch communications I like. They might, then, prefer to get information from an IBM avatar in SL than from an IBM blogger in RL. For now though the scalability problems inherent in synchronous communication (you all have to be there at once), the lack of an ability to search any kind of log/history/previous interactions and the limitations of the environment make me think that I am going to be writing my blog for a long time before I feel compelled to open an SL "decision management" island.

Technorati Tags: blog, Second Life, IBM

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