Amateurs into experts, by Jeffrey Veen

Amateurs into experts

Back when I was a consultant, I was fortunate enough to work on number of projects dealing with blogging. Most of that effort was directed at the usability of publishing online. In fact, that was probably the biggest innovation that blogging brought to the web: getting rid of the requirement of FTP and HTML to update a site.

But that was then. Now, all that effort the tool companies put into making blogging software usable has made the power of publishing available to anyone and everyone - there are millions and millions of blogs online having a tremendous influence on how we consume and produce media. This has had an interesting if unanticipated affect: now that it's so easy to write online, what should I write about?

SixApart clearly saw this as an opportunity when they developed Vox, blogging software that actively offers suggestions about what to write about each day. This has happened in print, as well. My good friend Maggie Mason recently wrote a book titled, "No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog" - an excellent collection of inspiration aimed at turning new bloggers into regular writers.

I think there's a bigger trend here. Clearly, the early web was effective at taking things that professionals always did and shifted the power to amateurs. But this next phase is about helping all those amateurs with their newfound access and turning them into experts. This isn't just limited to blogging, of course. Travelocity and Expedia made us all into travel agents; Flyspy and Farecast want make us really good at it.

It makes me wonder what else we might get good at?

This entry was written by Jeffrey Veen and posted 17 January 2007 at 7:38 PM. It was filed under Web Design.

Comments

1. On 18 January 2007 at 12:00 AM sean coon wrote:

i'm hoping for better listeners...

2. On 18 January 2007 at 8:05 AM Chris wrote:

Flickr is helping me become a better photographer. For those individuals that share their EXIF data, I can begin to understand the variables behind photos I love. The exposure, lens, use of flash, etc.

3. On 21 January 2007 at 4:39 PM Serge Lescouarnec wrote:

Serge

If you are a food blogger and had an amazing lunch people might want to know.
They surely will not care to know what you have for lunch each and everyday especially if it is as boring as fries and ketchup.
As far as the writing goes, I think certain days you will have no time, ideas or inspiration then it is better to let the day go by.
As you have written more posts over time, your site will still get visitors as people can visit your archives.

My impressions

Serge
Biz:
http://www.njconcierges.com
Blog:
http://www.sergetheconcierge.com

4. On 23 January 2007 at 11:43 AM Todd O'Neill wrote:

Just finished "Dispatches from Blogistan: A Travel Guide for the Modern Blogger" by Suzanne Stefanac. Although not a personal friend of the author [ :-) ] I'd recommend it. Less of a "how to" and more of a "where from" or a "why should".
Blogging is hard and the book provides some much needed perspective that anything like blogging in the past has been hard. I liked the reality check.

5. On 29 January 2007 at 12:45 AM Frederick Townes wrote:

A very good point to be sure, but for some reason your post takes me off on a tangent. With the proliferation of blogs pushing so much content onto an already muddied platform, I wonder what criteria people are using to determine if they're finding the authoritative content they might be after. I don’t think using search engines or word of mouth (links amongst bloggers) is enough. It's easy to get lost in a few clicks and find yourself in another neck of the woods, enjoying someone's insight on a topic (which is absolutely cool), but it's entirely another thing to try to chase down authorities on topics and avoid "sensational" content from maintstream sources. I suppose that my point is I wish for any given topic there would be well-known blogs with the non-opinionated reference content Wikipedia provides, but with more freshness attached to current events and trends.