Anne Truitt Zelenka

Tech bloggers almost always blog under their real names. One thing that made it easier to start blogging under my own name here was to change it. My married name was a name I used anyway so it didn’t feel disruptive to use it online. It felt like an easy and empowering way to instantiate the second professional version of me. Science Woman has been writing about women and names. Ann Bartow of Sivacracy and Elizabeth of Half-Changed World discuss using real names versus pseudonyms in blogging.

Using my own name in blogging is related to declarative living, “publishing preferences to the web cloud, in the form of metadata that can be aggregated to create models of interest.” As the volume of user-generated content on the web explodes, it will be more and more important for individuals to be able to take advantage of trusted people’s knowledge about what’s useful and important. Weblogs support this because the blogger shares the links and ideas she deems valuable. A smart blogger helps us cut through the garbage. Internet users can share so much more now too: bookmarks, feed subscriptions, and photos, among other things. For me, using my own name was a tentative first step in declaring “this is who I am.” Once I felt comfortable using my real name in blogging, I didn’t mind so much the thought of sharing my feed subscriptions via Bloglines. I am just getting used to having my bookmarks in del.icio.us be available for the world to browse.

If I’m going to use Web 2.0 capabilities such as reading lists (i.e. dynamically-updated lists of feed subscriptions) and aggregated reviews, I want to know who the people behind the curtains are. As I find individuals I trust and whose opinions I respect, I can view the world through their eyes–this is like the idea of the Squidoo lens–and I can better avoid what’s offensive or crassly commercial or irrelevant.

This is yet another formulation of how Web 2.0 pivots on the individual. The key nodes in the read/write web are not newspaper websites or search engines or folksonomies or home pages of large corporations. The key nodes are individuals. It doesn’t mean we live in self-absorbed and isolated worlds of our own devisings–no, just the opposite. We expand our view and our knowledge by learning from other people’s individual experiences and skills. We participate in multiple communities and networks, yet always retaining our individual identities.

How do you monetize that though? That’s the question keeping venture capitalists and entrepreneurs and Google employees wide awake at night. Well, if the individual is at the center of it all, perhaps we are finally reaching the world that employment self-help books have been describing for as long as I’ve read them. That is, the world where individuals act as businesses unto themselves but flexibly combine their talents with other people and organizations on an ad hoc basis. How about Memeorandum as “proof of person”–it’s not about how much Memeorandum itself can make, but how it shows the incredible talents of Gabe Rivera, its developer. And here’s James Governor, conceptualizer of declarative living, suggesting that those who want to become industry analysts need to blog first to display their writing and thinking talents.

I like what Squash said:

What I’ve really come to understand during my four-day blogging career, is a lot of blogs, particularly those that operate in broader, mass-appeal areas like tech, is that their core asset is not a community. The community is “owned” by the collective blogosphere, not any one particular blog. So what is the blog’s core asset then? I think it’s the knowledge, reputation and credibility of the blog’s operator.

Therefore, what needs to be monetised then, is not the blog, but the blogger.

You know what this does? It cuts out the skimmers: the people who don’t add any value on their own but just sit in the middle of the process collecting tithes from those who produce the value. We do need some of those helpers–we need search engines, folksonomies, photo sharing sites, and so forth–but we don’t need as many as we used to. Now I’m starting to understand why some people call Web 2.0 disruptive. It is disruptive if you were hoping, like Gather and Top Ten Sources, to make a bunch of money on the backs of individual content developers and editors. The value in what the best bloggers, lens-makers, service developers, open source programmers, tag gardeners, and photograph sharers do exists mostly in the individuals themselves, not in the disembodied content they produce. We are the geese; our blogs, tags, photos, software… that’s just our golden eggs.