Is social networking devaluing the role of hot and spicy food blogs?
As I was sifting through the pile of messages I get from the Chileheads Facebook page, I started to ponder the ever-increasing role of social networking on the life of the average chilehead. It wasn't that long ago, that social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Google+ did not yet exist. The coming of the blogs was a new and exciting aspect of the chilehead world that coincided with much of our hobbies (and for some, their vocations) invading the virtual world. For each person who had a blog, it was their own personal voice that
let them stand on a soapbox and tell everyone passing by a little about themselves, what they liked, and even what they didn't like. For the most part, however, it was a first-person voice since blogs almost always reflected primarily the opinions of the blog's owner…or the main writer, anyway. Sure, the chilehead world has seen its share of opinionated commenters, effusive personalities, and even a ugly troll or two, but the oomph of the blog usually came from one voice.
Enter the social networks…
Now, opinions are like assholes…everyone has one. However, now each person can not only share their opinions, but can interact with others about topics in a way that few people had ever imagined. So if you didn't care for the way that a particular blog just shat upon your favorite hot sauce, you can take to Facebook and launch your own diatribe about how much you like it and think that everyone should be forced to carry a bottle of it in their pants.
But I digress….
It does make me wonder, though, whether or not that blogs and bloggers have lost a bit of steam with this change in the virtual world. Why rely on someone else's take on it when you can tweet out 140 characters about it yourself? Perhaps let all the chileheads on the Facebook page know about your prowess growing peppers or rubbing Jolokia peppers across your gums? This would seem to be a snowball rolling downhill.
I don't begrudge it. In fact, I embrace it. To quote the words of the immortal Ferris Bueller:
Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
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Commented at July 19, 2011- 8:19 am
I have a lot I can say about social networking, but I’ll attempt to keep it brief.
For years I’ve seen Twitter and Facebook as a great marketing tool for my blog. I had built up a pretty sizable audience on Twitter and posting links to my latest posts generated quite a bit of traffic for me. I see social networking sites being indispensable in this way.
On the negative side, I notice that half the time when I post the latest link up on Facebook, people will comment on the post directly on Facebook underneath where I posted the link instead of on my blog. I see that instead of each blog being the hub of all commentary and activity, it’s now spread out thereby making it more difficult to see everyone’s thoughts and reactions to something cause I have to check several places now.
Commented at July 21, 2011- 10:17 pm
so,that partly explains the break from facebook.
Commented at July 22, 2011- 8:44 am
Great post Joe.
Scott, you’ve hit the nail square on the head with this one. That right there is 100% what knocked the wind out of my sails writing for TTF.
As Joe stated in the post, a blog’s perspective is singular, but I don’t believe it’s as singular as just being the blog owner’s perspective. Well, not always. Especially when the blog has several contributors. And for me, that’s what i enjoyed about writing and contributing to a blog site. It wasn’t ever about me, it was about the interaction with others that shared the same interests as me and what their ideas and experiences were. I enjoyed reading others contributions way more that I did making my own. So for me, seeing people taking their discussions and contributions over to social sites, it became almost like a waste of time to make an effort to write anything. I tried using FB in the beginning, but found everything there to be way too convoluted and hard to follow. Absolutely no sense of organization at all. Just a streaming mess. Trying to pick out someones comments on FB about something that I had written from the mess of posts about Farming, Mafia battles, and the other countless myriad of things not even related to me or even my interests was way to time consuming and difficult. So I ditched it.
Then G+ came along. It’s way different than FB, but has some things in common. The one and major difference for me though is that it appears to be a social platform that will allow a blogger to share their information from their site, but at the same time be able to direct the commentary and interaction to the site as well, keeping the blog the central hub of the activity. I’ve noticed that on G+ that a lot of people are actually use IT as their blog, redirecting their web address to their G+ account. Even though it’s still open only to invites, public posts can be read without and account. Not a perfect solution for everyone, especially for sites such as HZO that contain a lot of archived data, and has a nice graphical look to it, but it’s a start and something that can’t be done with FB.
So, what’s my point about touting G+? Well, to answer Joe’s post title question, Is social networking devaluing the role of hot and spicy food blogs?
I think the simple answer to that is that yes, it has, BUT, G+ may just be able to turn that around and provide the best of both worlds.
Commented at July 22, 2011- 8:50 am
Admittedly, I have not gotten into Google+ just yet. I set up the basic structure for my page, but just don’t feel that burst of creativity when I sit down to play with it. I feel like I have put so much work into my FB page to get it the way I want it, and don’t want to do much of the same stuff again by starting from scratch. I am sure I will get to it eventually, but for now I leave it alone for the most part.
- Joe
Commented at July 22, 2011- 9:51 am
I guess my point of view would be different had I embraced FB, but with just recently re-joining, and mainly just to reconnect with old friends, not for blogging purposes, most of my time has been spent exploring G+. It’s rekindled my interest in writing again, and although I’m not highly active with it yet, I feel that is the better direction for me to go on the social hiway. I still don’t have the time to jump into the fast lane with it though. There’s a couple of “life” priorities that I need to take care of first, then my priorities can shift.
Again, excellent post Joe. Thanks.
Commented at July 23, 2011- 8:03 pm
Opinions aren’t like assholes…opinions are like belly buttons, everyone has one, no one knows how to use it right.
Commented at July 24, 2011- 10:38 am
I can always look to you Jon for a possitive comment…
The way that i see it is this… I have over 4000 friends on facebook.. Do i know them all? NO.. but for Peppers and More to reach out to many different people is good for us. I could care less of where someone reads what I posted, just as long as they read it and remember PnM… Period!!!…
Running a blog is hard work and you all know exactly what I mean. It takes time that we dont have, but we do it because we love it. Sure its hard work to keep up with My Space,Facebook,twitter and others but we do it beacuse we love the industry..Anywhere someone reads something that we post on another site other than our own should be take it as one more person getting to know our name’s
Great to see that you are using Facebook DK. As much as I dont understand more than half of what you do…I realy do enjoy reading most of your reviews….
Commented at July 24, 2011- 8:09 pm
Hudd, I’m taking a short break from FB for vastly different and personal reasons.
DK, I have not sat down with Google+ to really play around with it. With my very limited knowledge and exposure to it, it seems like it’s nothing special there…and in fact, I think it suffers from the same limitations that Google Wave had: hardly anyone was on it, no thanks to the Google invite system, and it made it far less useful as a tool. FB, on the other hand, has nearly everybody on it, so it’s easily to reach the masses. Plus, it will take a good year or two before a lot of folks will convert over to G+, so it may be that long before I can personally see it’s full potential.
But who knows? I may start playing around with G+ in the next few weeks and fall in love with it. Realistically, I’ll probably just use it as a semi-marketing tool like I do with Twitter and not use it much for the personal interaction. At least for the time being.
Commented at July 29, 2011- 11:52 pm
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