This post is an experiment. I took comments that I left on three different blogs and tried to find some way to tie them together and see what pops out.

This blog post idea comes from one of my older posts called Ten uncanny blog post ideas - this is idea 8:

8. Find at least three of your best comments that you left on other blogs. Use them to write your own blog post. Find a way to tie the three comments together.

Blog post #1

The first comment was left on a post at the Spark blog (CBC Radio) in reference to a podcast entry by Merlin Mann of 43Folders.com who wrote about managing readers expectations when blogging:

(it would probably help if you listened to the podcast first)

Here’s my comment:

My own blogging experience suggests that Merlin’s idea of expectation setting is right on the mark. It’s like any product: Coke should always taste like Coke; hockey games should always have at least one fight (not that I condone the violence, it’s just a fact of hockey); and babies need people to change their diapers. If you change the product, some people won’t recognize it and others will despite the change.
If I ever start blogging about Coca-Cola, hockey, or diapers, I would expect my audience to vacate almost immediately. Unless, of course, I found creative ways to talk about those topics within the context of my blog.

It’s worth noting that some blogs and writers are successful at having a melange of ideas and topics, but that’s what we come to expect from them! It would be disappointing if, say, Boing Boing always talked about the same things over and over again.

However, if you can manage the expectations of an audience over time and introduce change gradually (or immediately if the readers demand it, I guess), then most will stay along for the ride and others will join up.

Great series by Merlin, looking forward to more.

Blog post #2

The next comment comes from a post at Io9.com, a blog devoted to science-fiction and fantasy. The post was called Comic books are the new stock market, talking about the collectible nature of comic books and how some are good investments:
excerpt: Where should you put your money in these uncertain financial times? Once-prudent investments in housing and the stock market no longer provide safe financial refuge for your hard-earned dollars. But some suggest that, when searching for a stable place to invest your money, you need look no further than your comic book collection.

My comment:

Alas, there’s so much quantity vs. quality with comic books that the only “sure things” are few and far between. The vast majority of the comic books published in the past two decades don’t even hold their cover value and go for pennies on the dollar. Silver and Golden Age are the only real investments with a hope and even then that could be subject to fickle fate. In 20 years even the “blue chip” comics will likely lose value as the comic book audience continues to shrink in size while gravitating to TV, movies, video games, YouTube… you name it.

Blog post #3

The third comment was left on Shel Israel’s Global Neighbourhoods blog on a post called Online Tribalism and the future of social media
exerpt: A couple of weeks back, I wrote a piece on the future of social media. It was not my best-received post. It is one of the few times that I have ever been criticized for brevity. But the issue was that I had a thought that has not fully developed, one that has been coming out in drips and drabs for several years.
The key thought is that while tools keep changing people don’t. We behave, for the most part, the same way we did when we were cave dwellers. The online tools we use today have allowed us to scale out conversations and eliminate many barriers such as geography, allowing us to build global neighborhoods whose members sometimes reside thousands of miles apart. The relevance of social media is that it allows us to interact in the world increasingly more like we behave in our own physical neighborhoods.

My comment:

The only thing that bothers me (and not that much, really) about the concept of the tribe is that it implies that there must be a leader or leaders of some kind. Difficult organizations and different cultures use different leadership models (autocratic to democratic; centralized to decentralized; individual vs. group). If we’re going to persist in maintaining the leadership concept, I’d like to see humanity evolve more to the point where members can disagree with leadership but somehow resolve those differences with less waste and hard feelings than most of us appear to be able to do these days. In other words, disagreements shouldn’t be perceived as threats to leadership.

This is going a bit off track, I guess, but those are the kinds of thoughts that pop into my mind when the term “tribe” is used.

So how do I tie this all together?

All three comments deal with human expectations and behavior:

  • If the blogger deviates from the persona and presence they’ve established for their blog (or their writing in general), they risk confusing and alienating their readership (note:  hope I don’t do this too much) by defying expectations.  It’s almost like breaking a promise.  We like change, except when we don’t.  If I start writing about hockey, Coca-Cola, or diapers, I’d better have a darned good reason for it!
  • People are always looking for ways to hoard value in objects that can be extracted later on.  Comic books were once seen as a way to do that.  However, during a massive supply-demand imbalance that really came to light in the 1990s when too much product was produced, comic books essentially became worthless.  Now, the only stuff that really holds value, with a few exceptions, is from the Silver and Golden Ages of comic books, which is stuff that’s normally 40 years old (or 50 or 60 or 70…), but even then the market values can range widely based on scarcity, the comic book content, the people who made the comic book, and the condition of the book.  A lot of people who hoarded comic books in plastic bags with backing boards in the 1990s now find that we can’t get our original investment back because, although the physical quality of these books is great, there’s too much supply and the content isn’t as revered as the older stuff.  In a weird way, this may have foreshadowed the mass-popularization of digital media and the amazing glut of content, paid and free, that’s out there today. The sad thing about the comic book industry, however, is that it’s (mostly) not free and there’s such an emphasis on getting the reader to buy so much content that it’s almost as unappetizing as the parts of the music industry that still want you to buy CDs.
  • The “tribes” concept in social media, which is gaining a lot of attention through Seth Godin’s new book Tribes, has a lot of value in it.  One part that I’m struggling with is the perceived need for leaders and ownership.  I like the aspects of social media which focus on communication and connection.  The leadership part within social media I struggle with, in part because in a way it reminds me of the political process (timely, what?) where we often expect our leaders to do great things and think for us.  Except, of course, we know that ultimately our leaders are normal human beings with flaws and quite often they are not much more advanced when we are.  As I get deeper into Godin’s book I believe that he’s talking about a kind of leadership that’s more leadership by example, but there are other things that I’m still trying to sort about that don’t work so well for me.

So, there you go.  This was a fun experiment, trying to find common ground in three apparently different blog post comments.  Maybe you should try it sometime.  There’s nine other uncanny blog post ideas in the post as well if you’d like to try them.

Other fun references: Social media blog posts for desperate people

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