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April 15, 2008, 02:20 PM ET
Blogs May Be Rendered Obsolete by New Technology
Academics interested in blogging for research-review purposes might want to take notice to some new developments—and debates—happening on the Web.
RSS feed aggregators are quickly becoming more sophisticated. New sites are cropping up, such as the recently-opened beta of Shyfter, which allow users to not only share their feeds, but also discuss specific posts in one place.
Some bloggers have taken issue with those developments. They say that Shyfter benefits from the use of their content and draws away discussion from their own blogs to another site. It makes it harder to track comments to their posts and keep discussion going.
The concept, however, doesn’t appear to be much different than what happens everyday on news sites such as Slashdot, which has a robust community of contributors.
It seems the heart of the matter is who gets to moderate or control the discussion.
Martin J. Weller, of the British-based Open University, has a forward-looking post on the evolving nature of blogging. He points out that blogs are having more competition with sites such as Twitter and FriendFeed for establishing discussion online because of their immediacy.
If discussion moves away from blogs themselves, one wonders if bloggers would still have incentive to publish.—Hurley Goodall
Categories: Social-Networking
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