A little while ago I wrote a two-part series called “Looking into the blogosphere through a sporting lens” (part 2 is here). The purpose of the series was to look at some questions underlying a Costas Now program, which itself was supposed to be an insightful look at the role of the blogosphere in relation sports reporting. While the video itself devolved into something far less thoughtful then it could have been, the questions it raised about the role and value of comments in the blogosphere continue to be quite interesting to me.

What leads me to bring this up again is blatant self-promotion are two very interesting posts, with wildly divergent perspectives on the comments issue. The first is from social media expert Chris Brogan, entitled “Musicians play for tips – The importance of comments“. In the post Chris reminds readers that comments are important, presents his rough calculations on the percentage of readers who comment (roughly 1/4 of 1%), and admits that his own personal commenting habits are roughly in the same ballpark.

Chris then goes on to list some other ways readers can leverage social media to help share and promote blog posts that they like – things like Stumbleupon and Digg – but the underlying message is that comments are a critical component of a successful blog post. Chris also mentions Seth Godin, who writes a very interesting blog for those interested in marketing and social media, who just so happens to have his comment tool disabled.

Helping to make his case, the comments section adds a lot to Chris’ post, as many people made thoughtful contributions (and I’m not just saying that because I am one of the contributors). Seth was among the respondents, stating that he can tell that he’s written a good post when readers send him thoughtful emails – though he doesn’t know what he’d do if he got as many emails as Chris gets comments. I’d be quite interested to hear why, exactly, Seth has disabled comments, but no explanation was included.

Regardless, this provides a nice segue into the other post that caught my eye – Jason McCabe announcing his retirement from blogging. Jason has been an enormously popular blogger, but now he’s decided to focus his efforts on publishing through a “new” medium – email lists. He’s also going to cap this list at 1,000 people or so, in the hopes of developing deeper relationships and stimulating more thoughtful conversations.

Many people are saying that Jason’s announcement rhymes with mull chit, and are calling it a publicity stunt – which it may well be. However, Jason raises some very interesting points about how blogging is now “simply too big, too impersonal, and lacks the intimacy that drew (him) to it”, and he goes on to talk about link baiting become such a big focus in blogs these days. This site was then nice enough to post Jason’s first email to his “exclusive” list, which includes the following tidbits (think: Jason = Buzz):

This is much different than you posting to my comments section and subjecting yourself to the trolls and haters who have taken up residency there. Why should we all build our homes and give residence to the trolls under them? Comments on blogs inevitably implode, and we all accept it under the belief that “open is better!” Open is not better. Running a blog is like letting a virtuoso play for 90 minutes are Carnegie Hall, and then seconds after their performance you run to the back Alley and grab the most inebriated homeless person drag them on stage and ask them what they think of the performance they overheard in the Alley. They then take a piss on the stage and say “F-you” to the people who just had a wonderful experience for 90 or 92 minutes. That’s openness for you… my how far we’ve come! We’ve put the wisdom of the deranged on the same level as the wisdom of the wise.

He also adds:

There are so many folks involved in blogging to today, and it’s moving at a much quicker pace thanks to “social accelerants” like TechMeme, digg, Friendfeed and Twitter. Folks are so desperate to be heard–and we all want to be heard that’s why we blog–that the effort put into being heard has eclipsed the actual hearing.

Suffice to say, these are two very different opinions – either comments are valuable additions to a good post, or they represent the ramblings of an inebriated homeless person. Why (again, putting the publicity argument to the side) might the perspectives be so different, having many of the same undertones of the Will Leitch vs. Buzz Bissinger argument? While we naturally lean a little more towards the “wisdom of crowds” perspective than the “wisdom of the deranged” argument around here, there is certainly a grain of truth in Jason’s argument.

I’m beginning to think that the value of comments is a function of topic area and scale. Chris Brogan is a social media guy, and in turn I would assume most of his readers are quite interested in social media, thus they want to represent themselves well – which naturally leads to better contributions and conversations. In other words, conversational media is great topic area for conversational media. Topics like sports, however, may not to be. Regardless of topic, blogs can become a victim of their own success – as readership increases not only are “bad” comments more likely, it becomes harder and harder to continue a real conversation and cultivate real relationships. Might there be an argument that blogging is best for those firmly cemented in the long tail?

I also find the different contexts that the social media tools are mentioned in interesting. On one hand, they’re helpful tools for people to promote writers and bloggers they like (a.k.a. the message from Chris); on the other, so many bloggers are focused on gaming the tools, and the sheer volume of blogs on the web makes it so hard to be found, that more effort is being put into distribution than quality content creation (a.k.a the message from Jason).

So what do you think? Please let me know in the comments, after you have Dugg, Reddit’d, and Stumbleupon’d my post, while tagging it on Delicious and emailing it to all your friends – unless you are the inebriated homeless guy .

For the last couple of weeks the blogosphere has been abuzz about a little piece that was on Costas Now. On the program a professional athlete (Braylen Edwards), the creator of a Deadspin (Will Leitch, representing the blogosphere), well-respected TV sports commentator (and host) Bob Costas, and Pulitzer Prize winning writer (and creator of Friday Night Lights) Buzz Bissinger sat down to talk about the pros and cons of the blogosphere in relation to sports journalism.

It was the right group of people for a great conversation – and it is the conversation that should have been that I hope to build on in this post. Unfortunately, what made this a story was that the actual conversation did not go particularly well. The professional athlete and the representative of the blogopshere did there part by participating as articulate, thoughtful individuals; Bob Costas was also articulate, but seemed more interested in piling on during a poorly conceived attack on Will then engaging in a thoughtful conversation; and Pulitzer prize winning Buzz Bissinger came across as a raving lunatic.

(note: once the people start talking after the long intro, it only takes about a minute for this to be established. Will starts saying a few things, Bob Costas quickly expresses surprise over Will being “very palatable” in person (even likable!!), and then the Pulitzer prize winner interjects with “I feel very strongly about this. I really think you’re full of s$%$.” It does not get better after that).

If Buzzinger and Costas had sat down to do a parody of the worst of the blogosphere on a TV program, they could hardly have done a better job. I’ve watched it a few times now, and read Buzz’s thoughtful follow-up interview from last week (among other stories on the subject) – suffice to say he is suitably embarrased. It makes the product that was turned out that much more unfortunate, as there seems to be plenty of material there for some thoughtful conversations on some interesting issues.

The first, and the one I’m going to begin exploring today, is the role and the value of comments. Every blogger loves comments, and in the age of mass collaboration every company and media outlet seems to be inviting any-and-everyone to “join the conversation.” In his follow-on interview, it becomes clear that a lot of what Buzz was complaining about was in regards to the comments on blogs. To quote:

I still maintain that the majority of blogs are founded upon mockery and maliciousness. And yes, a lot of those are the comments, but the comments go hand in hand with the posts. I know the difference, and let’s face it, the more provocative the blog is, the more comments it gets, the more hits it gets, the more traffic it gets, the more chances you get of getting advertising, which is what all bloggers want.

Given that it seems everyone in the blogosphere is arguing that the comments section is the key to a successful post, it’s clear that Buzz has a point- they appear to go hand and hand. Put another way, it’s hard to say that having people “join the conversation” is one of the strengths of the blogosphere, and then turn around and argue that blogs should not be held accountable for the conversation they stimulate. So it seems valid to look at the value created by the “conversations”, and particularly whether it exceeds the “mockery and maliciousness” that comment sections seem to invite, particularly on sports-themed blogs.

Let’s begin by focusing on the word “conversation.” I know for a fact that all of my best conversations involve exactly two people. I was also at a conference last week where they reminded me that our “assignment teams” couldn’t be larger than eight people – research shows that anything more is counterproductive. Text-based online conversations may be able to handle more people than that in a “conversation”, particularly if they build slowly. I’d be just guessing what this number would be, but whatever it is, I’m quite sure it’s less than the hundreds or thousands of comments that (for example) posts on the ESPN Conversation Beta routinely get. Can you really have a valuable “conversation” with this many people trying to talk at once?

I would argue no – particularly on “hot news” topics that tend to have a short shelf life. Now the ESPN Conversation Beta (I chose it as an example because it’s one of the better ones) does appear to be reasonably moderated, so many of the malicious attacks you see on many other sites (and that Buzz complains about) aren’t neccesarily there. There also doesn’t tend to be an annoying collection of people vying to have the first post by typing in “FIRST!!” and pressing submit as soon as a story goes up (or at least they are moderated out). But just because it’s better doesn’t mean it’s valuable to me. If I read through the 5,983 comments (and counting) on stories like this one (the Patriots are cheaters!), I might find 5-10% of them insightful and interesting, several times that many somewhat offensive, and many more just annoying – in addition to all those that are simply redundant. In turn, I never, ever look at them – unless researching a post like this one. I do spend sometime wondering what incents someone to provide comment 786 or 5,786 – weird, no?

So what is the value of the comments section to the vast majority of people looking for sports stories? Probably quite small, and on many, many sites the comments section devolves into exactly what Buzz was talking about. To articulate it more clearly, conversations do not scale well. In what appears to be a bit of a paradox, the more popular a post is, the less likely the follow-on conversation is to be interesting. Moreover, when hundreds of comments flood onto a page within hours (as often happens on the sports blogs), there is no coherence to it – it reads more like random people yelling somewhat random things at each other than an actual conversation.

How might this be addressed? One simple option is for more blogs to develop “threaded conversations”, akin to traditional message boards. It’s simple really – enable people to respond to individual comments, where the reader can follow along a particular thread of interest. This allows readers to (hopefully) engage in smaller, more targeted conversations on something they find interesting -and/or start a new one with a few people if another thread gets overrun. At some level a scale issue will obviously develop again, but for all but the most popular blogs I think there is some value here – and not very many sites seem to be doing it.

Another thing that I would like to see, and what sports writers might be more interested in, is a step beyond “moderated” comments sections to (for lack of a better term) “exclusive conversations”. In this model, you’d pre-select a small group of people (say, mostly staff writers of differing opinions) to engage in a conversation with each other in response to a particular article. It’s not “mass collaboration” by any stretch of the imagination, but I know that I’d find a debate between five thoughtful writers to be a more valuable offering than current comments sections – and you could always allow threaded conversations connected to. Again, it’s an opportunity that the “blogosphere” enables that few sites seem to be taking advantage of.

Finally, right now I find the best way to proxy an interesting “conversation” on a given topic that’s been written about online is to search for other complete blog posts that either link to, or directly reference, the main article. Might some media outlets create additional value by monitoring all the related posts in the blogosphere for a given topic, and provide them as links to their readers at the bottom of articles? Some very interesting “conversations” could be generated this way, “commenters” are incented to be thoughtful rather than just quick – and if the original writer responds to certain ones, all the better. In such a case, the original creator of the content creates additional value for readers, and keeps them engaged, by not only linking directly into the “blogosphere ecosystem”, but by helping filter for them as well.

That’s just a couple of ideas, but it’s worthwhile for everyone involved in the blogosphere to think about how “conversation” might be reframed to create more value for readers. Conversations are good, but they don’t scale particularly well – and as such they could use some better structure and management to make them more valuable. Are there a few people here (hopefully not 4,200 of you ) that have some thoughts on the issue?