Scoble on "Group Blogs"

Scoble seems to have a negative view of group blogs (“sucks” was the adjective he used). I understand some of his points, but I disagree with him on the bigger picture.

I’m a developer in a small company in the tiny Boston suburb of Hudson. For the last 8 years I’ve developed commercial shrink-wrap products in a miniscule vertical (independent automotive repair shops). I’ve never written a book, I have nothing from MIT on my office wall, and I could count the number of close friends in the software industry on my hands. And yet my blog is read by thousands each month (maybe more).

Without the collective power of .NET Blogs behind me I would have little chance of gaining such a voice in the community. I certainly wouldn’t have a chance of my comments on Scoble’s post read by the man himself.  And while I do risk the signal-to-noise ration drowning me out, I have a greater chance of being heard simply because I share a podium with some rather impressive individuals.

I do agree that communal blogs lend themselves to comparisons with newsgroups, but I disagree that this is a bad thing. Newsgroups have so much noise that I often wonder if there is any signal in there at all. Newsgroups are often dominated by rude, obnoxious, and strangely porn obsessed megalomaniacs while the communal blogs are moderated by the site owner and the individual blogers. And where I once searched newsgroups to find code solutions, I now start with .NET Weblogs. So yes, they are like newsgroups in many ways. But I don’t see it as a bad thing; I see it more like evolution of the medium.