Are blogs scalable?

Some of the men in pyjamas who populate the blogosphere, at least in the imagination of one senior BBC executive, are gleefully predicting that the MSM will fall off the blogging bandwagon. Major media, they say, will encourage too many people to post comments, thereby making their blogs unmanageable.

Not even the BBC will be able to recruit enough editors to cope, as what was conversation rapidly degenerates into mere information. Blogging, they argue, is not scalable.

Apparently, blogging is an intimate dinner, for a handful of guests, not some vulgar office party. A few bloggers even suggest that popular sites may have to put a cap on the number of visitors who can post comments.

The demise of the big blogs, they hope, will provide opportunity for the rest. The thinking is that users will resent losing themselves in the crowd and eventually gravitate back to the one-on-one conversations they have experienced on smaller blogs.

I think they are wrong: blogging is not about creating a single conversation. If you want one-on-one, then choose e-mail or IM.

Why should there be any limit to the number of discussions that can develop around a debate?

A case in point is Beppe Grillo's controversial blog on Italian politics. Grillo's posts regularly generate over a thousand comments, within which you will find dozens of conversations between smaller groups of users.

Ideas are not lost; invariably they are retrieved and revisited by subsequent users and make their way back to Grillo. These are genuine debates, rather than visitors leaving behind the electronic equivalent of "I woz here" graffiti.

It is the interactivity that keeps visitors going back, which is why the MSM are interested in the first place. Blogging is a community strategy, a logical progression from chat rooms and message boards, as Jay Rosen points out:

"User loyalty and engagement with the site: that's why newspapers need blogs. Some grasp that, some don't."

Rosen is writing about print media, but the same applies to broadcasters. Kevin Anderson makes a similar point:

"We used to call it stickiness, how much time people actually spend on your site. But this is even more than stickiness."

It is sound marketing and therefore highly unlikely that the MSM will abandon blogging in the foreseeable future. In my view, the idea of restricting comments is plain daft: no-one ever based a successful community strategy on excluding large parts of the audience.

John Naughton's recent essay on the changing media ecosystem suggests there is room for everyone: it is just a case of learning how to adapt. TV did not kill radio, Internet has not killed TV and big media blogs are not a threat to smaller blogs.

This is, after all, the era of the long tail: at least, that is how I console myself.

Comments

[Mike Mullane]

Robin,

It is my fault for not writing more clearly, but I think you have misunderstood what I was trying to say. The idea that the Beeb will not be able to recruit enough editors to cope with moderation is part of the fallacy that I was trying to refute.

If an Italian comedian is managing to moderate hundreds of comments all by himself, then it really isn't a problem for the BBC.

Nor was I implying that the BBC has not embraced blogging - one manager does not represent an entire corporation and anyhow, what's wrong with wearing pyjamas when you blog?

[Robin Hamman]

As the person project managing the BBC's blogs network, I can assure you that there is not widespread feeling within the BBC that blogging is not a sustainable activity or that the comments are a particular problem.

We're actively encouraging the BBC's bloggers to not only engage with the comments on their blogs, but to use tools like technorati to find, track and participate in the conversations that happen on third party blogs outside bbc.co.uk.

We are having some technical issues with our blog comments at the moment - essentially, the comment management interface slows to a crawl at peak times - but in so far as moderation and editorial issues go, I don't think we have any serious issues at all.

The BBC's blogs are not only getting a huge audience, they're enabling us to engage with our audiences in new and interesting ways - you can find the figures and my arguments as to why the BBC should be blogging here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/podsandblogs/2006/11/whats_the_purpose_of_tv_and_ra.shtml

Hopefully you'll send the BBC exec you quoted a link to this post and comment, and that they'll get in touch so that I can show them the dozens and dozens of examples we've collected to demonstrate what blogging can do for the BBC.

As for the comments requiring more editors than is sustainable, I'm afraid they've got it just plain wrong - we have technical fixes in development to relieve the slowness of the system and have plenty of editorial advice and support on hand should they wish to get in touch and ask about it.

Robin Hamman
Senior Producer
BBC Blogs Network

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs