HW 16: Five Pillars of Conversational Software

Scoble discusses five things that made blogging hot, these five things he refers to as the five pillars of converstional software. The first pillar that he talks about is "ease of publishing".When Scoble refers to what made blogging hot and says that it has a lot to do with the ease of publishing, it means that it is simple and a quick task to write a blog and have it published. Publishing a blog can take up to 3 minutes, where as publishing a book can take years. Blogging is an easy way for people to put their opinions out there without taking a longtime, therefore their thoughts can be published easily. The second pillar is "discoverability". If a person writes a blog for the public to see, anyone can read it, a journalist, a movie director and keep track of them over time if the blog catches their interest. If a director is reading someones blog everyday, and he see's potential for that person as a writer or actor, that person could easily be discovered as was Scoble by a Microsoft executive because the executive followed his blogs for five months. The third pillar that made blogging hot was "cross-site conversations". When Scoble refers to cross-site conversations, I am not sure directly what he means but he says that he can see who is linking him with trackbacks. So I assume that it means if someone is to read his blog they can go back and forth and recieve updates for when Scoble writes a new blog so that they can go read the blog immediatly. The fourth pillar was "permalinking". Permalinking means that if a person is looking for a blog written about a certain topin, they can type in any key word that may be used in the blog and it will take them directly to a post written about or using the key words. Such as when looking for something using Google, a person types in the key words that they need to find information about and many links come up. The same thing can be done with blog posts. Then the last pillar that Scoble chats about is "syndication". Syndication is a large word that i am not famliar with but Scoble says "I never had to give any marketing information or my email address and it just organized itself" (Kline and Burstein 130). It makes sense to me that when Scoble talks about the fifth pillar syndication, he means that he can see many peoples blogs, and possibly even comment if he feels the need without having to give a the blog writers all of their information to just lookover their blogs. Basically because this person has a blog and it is open to the public eyes, anyone can read it without having the writers permission and having to give them all of their information. These five points, also referred to as the pillars of conversational software by Robert Scoble, are the five important things that made blogging such a hot phenomenon.