I’ve read Robert Scoble’s blog
for a long time, and regardless of your opinion of him, he does have some
insights about blogs and their role in the formation of communities. In his
work, you read a lot about “conversations” and how blogs can facilitate the
conversation with and within a community.
is not really happening on the GIS blogs. The only place you’ll see anything
akin to a conversation is on James
Fee’s blog, and then it’s only when he rips on ESRI, and a bunch of other
people thrown in a “me to!” or “you tell ‘em!”. I’ve been thinking about
this for a while now… and I have come up with two possibilities (I’d love to
hear others) Its a Numbers Thing:
Do the other hot blogging
areas (i.e. politics and software development) simply have so many more people
involved that they can attain a critical mass, from which a sort of
decentralized meta-community occurs? The problem I have with this is that there
are 1000′s and 1000′s of people who use spatial technologies, so even a small
percentage should result in more bloggers and readers (who, I’d assume would be
commenters – thus the conversation!). But this just does not seem to be the
case. Which leads to… Technical Savvy
Is the GIS community at
large simply not technically savvy enough to be “into” blogs in a large way?
Some readers may get a little bent by this characterization – after all, we do
“computer mapping”, which requires us to be technically inclined. Right? Back
when you had to know how to grep your file system to locate that bash script you
wrote to automate mounting and unmounting drives while running a set of kriging
amls – yes – you had to have a certain level of savvy. But, with ArcMap and the
draggy-droppy-love-fest that is model builder, I think we can agree that the bar
has been lowered. Perhaps this is translating into people who don’t “google” a
problem, and who would never find a blog, let alone comment on a post, or start
their own blog. Maybe with IE7, the wide adoption of RSS through Office 12
and Windows Vista we’ll see this change, but for now I think it’s just the
alpha-geeks… and apparently we don’t like to talk with eachother – more just talking (or posting) at eachother. Anyhow – I just thought this was interesting, but what are your thoughts? Would having the conversations matter?
Are the ESRI (and other) forums enough? Is blogging to arcane for the GIS masses? When will it hit the tipping point?
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