So, Robert Scoble has left the blogosphere. I’m not entirely sure in what sense his blog was not an instance of social media but I do know why this bothers me. It’s not just that he no longer owns his own space but that we don’t either. I am certainly not going to use Facebook to follow him – the company has neither his nor my interests in mind. I might catch the odd post via Twitter or Google+, but it will be lost in a sea of other things and won’t grab my attention, and any attempt I might make to organize and control the tide will be susceptible to the whims of the companies that own the sites, who are playing a much too large role in determining what I get to see in my particular filter bubble as it is.
If I’m going to be in a bubble then I want to be the one that makes it. The great thing about blogs is that they are distributed, not centralized, owned by individuals, not organizations. This is not just important to the individuals that they belong to, but to the individuals that read them, subscribe to them, aggregate them, remix them and learn from them. That’s why things like WordPress, Elgg (that runs this site) and Known (by Ben Werdemuller, who co-developed Elgg) matter more than all the glitzy social silos put together.
Address of the bookmark: http://scobleizer.com/?p=8494
