Johnnie Moore

Do group blogs suck?

Johnnie Moore

Johnnie Moore

I’m Johnnie Moore, and I help people work better together

Robert Scoble reckons that Group Blogs Suck. It’s a good thought including this point:

The thing is my visitors are coming to see me. Me alone. If I am interesting the numbers increase. If I’m not interesting, they decrease. It’s a very visible feedback loop.

But, in a group blog, my traffic goes up based on how interesting the GROUP is. In other words, if there’s 10 people writing a blog and I’m an uninteresting member, my traffic goes up because of the other nine. Yet readers are stuck reading me, even if I’m boring.

But I think there are other ways to look at this, as I do both my own blog (here) and am in three group blogs – Beyond Branding, Mutual Marketing and Mutualist Manifesto.

I guess I use each blog differently, and it’s always a compromise of a kind. I put whatever I like in this blog but I do tailor what I write in collaborative blogs so that it coheres with other writes. You could say this amounts to self-censorship; I prefer to think of it as a structure that makes me think more.

Sure, group blogs may tend to average out opinion, but I like the challenge of collaborating which sometimes means sublimating my ego a bit more than I do in my own space.

Scoble worries about the “owner” of the group blog being in control, but in the group blogs I do, no-one is in control, somehow we just get along. Sure, some of what others write I don’t fully agree with – but I can live with a measure of dissonance. I find it thought-provoking. Anyway, I quite often read stuff Iwrote a while ago and disagree with it.

So I guess I’m saying, it’s not an either-or choice. At least not for me.

Also, so what if sometimes others get credit for “my” thoughts, and sometimes the other way round? That’s ok, I think the idea of owning ideas is a bit twentieth century; ultimately that’s the mindset of SCO in their miserable lawsuit against IBM.

Share Post

More Posts

Blogging for Ourhouse

Welcome to the Ourhouse Weblog. Blogging is something I’ve become increasingly interested in. Earlier this month I set up the Beyond Branding Blog which is

Collaboration

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking – and worrying – about collaboration. I think the ability to collaborate effectively is becoming ever more essential

Just Undo It?

The AntiBrand: blackSpot sneakers, a project by Adbusters attacks Nike directly. In doing so they take on what has become one of the great icons

Trust and NGOs

My friend Olaf Brugman has invited me to take part in a workshop in Brussels on October 29th. It looks set to be an interesting

SharpReader

I’ve finally started paying attention to RSS and all this stuff about “Blog Aggregators”. The final shove was wanting to get Martin Roell’s English feed.

More Updates

Emotional debt

Releasing the hidden costs of pent up frustrations

Aliveness

Finding the aliveness below the surface of stuck

Johnnie Moore

Open Source Museum Going

Good spot by Tom Guarriello: The New York Times reports today that podcasters have hacked MoMA. Instead of listening to the official audio guides provided by authoritative critics visitors are

Johnnie Moore

Change and frustration

I loved this from Chris Corrigan. He’s talking about the difficulties of change. We don’t know what we are doing. Everything we have been doing so far has resulted in

Johnnie Moore

More inequality

I liked Simon Jenkins’ article challenging the way the Government has handled the Baby P affair. If you totally screw up a bank a Labour minister will grant you a

Johnnie Moore

Inspiration

I’m still feeling great after running a facilitation day for a client with my friends at The Clarity Partnership last Friday. This was an opportunity to work with a leadership