Month: November 2020

I have blogged since 2002 and since I have started I have written thousands of posts now organized into three blogs (Learning Aloud, Blurts, and Curmudgeon Speaks). The first two blogs are focused on educational topics and technology tutorials and the final on a range of topics unrelated to my professional interests. I have a sense that the personal blog is becoming less popular. Blogs and podcasts have come to be dominated by commercial backers. There is only so much reading/listening time and it is becoming difficult to keep an audience. Blogs also require more work (relative to social media services) and fewer and fewer folks seem to learn how to use an RSS reader to make the following of multiple blogs easy and efficient. Much of the traffic I get now comes from Twitter (all posts generate a tweet that provides a link), but if I am right about this method of alerting potential readers, the maximum possible readers would be limited to the size of my list of Twitter friends who are interested in education. 

I am not going to abandon blogging mostly because I value having a place where the content I have generated is curated. I wrote regularly on Facebook during the Trump era, but there was always a sense that any effort directed at that outlet was “here today and gone tomorrow”. A service with such characteristics does not seem the place to store content such as tutorials intended to have some long term value.

Sites to which multiple individuals post and comment have obvious advantages for engagement even though the content submitted there eventually fades into the mists of time. Blogs do allow commenting, but the interaction on Facebook or Twitter is obviously far greater and more vigorous. This can be both good and bad, but ignoring the deserved negative attention of recent times, the opportunity to engage a group around a topic on such platforms offers clear advantages if the goal is interaction among participants.

I hope to increase the time I spend in such interaction now that I feel free from the hours I spend engaged in Political arguments on Facebook. I spent this time because I felt it important to the way I wanted to think about the future of this country. I have always been interested in argumentation and I certainly had the opportunity to explore both the positive and negative elements of argumentation in discussing my liberal political views. It is this interactivity I hope to experience around other topics.

I have several reasons to abandon Facebook despite the popularity of this platform. First, I just think the dominance of Facebook is not a good thing. Most folks don’t care, but I have what I consider a professional interest in the long view of online learning and I just don’t think it is a good thing when there is not healthy competition offering alternatives and driving innovation. Second, I disagree with some of Facebook’s methods. I understand the ad revenue model (see the comments that follow), but Facebook uses information collected from users to personalize ads (a useful thing in some circumstances) to tell users what they want to know and to prioritize emotion-provoking content. Being told what you want to hear is not the same as the best information available and encourages confirmation bias. Both promoting this bias and emotion-provoking content increase attention leading to the opportunity to sell more ads leading to the opportunity to collect more information, etc., etc.

Follow the money

I think it fair to argue that the big players in this space must generate a revenue stream to pay for their infrastructure and pay their employees. Of course, there is also the opportunity to make a great deal of money.

If one ignores open-source software which certainly exists and maybe fun to explore, the services that will be able to actually compete seem to fall into three categories (I offer an example for each). 

Ads – Facebook 

General contribution – WT:Social

Focused contribution – rent space – MeWe

With time to spend, I want to explore options to Facebook.

So, Facebook clearly dominates this space and relies on ad revenue which might be interpreted by users as free. If one does not mind viewing ads and we all certainly view ads all of the time, Facebook may seem free. What we are really spending is information about ourselves. Facebook collects this information which is valuable to companies wanting to target ads as effectively as possible. 

We could pay for a social service and receive access without the collection of personal data or the need to view ads. I see two options here. In the first option, one pays a fee to gain access to the service. WT:Social is an example of this approach. You can use WT:Social for free, but the service wants you to subscribe. The second option would like you to rent space as a contributor. MeWe is my example of this approach. You can post a certain amount of content at no cost, but at some point you are expected to pay for additional storage and other services. 

I am exploring both WT:Social and MeWe. Both offer opportunities to create or join groups and the feed you encounter then depends on those you friend or the groups you join. So, the experience in both cases resembles Facebook with a greater emphasis on groups and without the ads. Both services face challenges overcoming what is known as the network effect. 

I have created groups on both platforms attempting to attract participants to a sharing of content associated with a theme of K12 use of technology. The links to these efforts are – https://wt.social/wt/k12-edtech, https://www.mewe.com/join/educationaltechnology-k12. The wt.social group has been active for the longest, but I would not regard this effort as successful. My observation of the wt.social content related to technology has mostly been that there are efforts with many posts by a single individual, but few group members (my example) or groups with many members and only a few posts. I have had far less time invested in MeWe, but I started a group on this site because there were no other groups under the education heading focused on general technology integration. What I can offer based on my experience to this point is that it is very difficult to organically create a group around a specific topic. Clearly, these groups are far smaller than Facebook, but the services argue they are growing. I worry that there is a perception that an individual attempting to create a group intends to use that group as a personal outlet very much in the tradition of a blog. This is not my intention and it is not consistent with the capabilities of social media groups. I will give my efforts a year or so and see what I think at that point.

On Wednesday (Nov. 11), I noticed an email from Google. It was a description of the changes to my Google Photos account. At present Google allows you to store as many “high quality” photos as you want for free. I am not certain what high quality is, but it is a compressed version of the original quality of a decent camera. High quality is still great quality. After June 1 of next year, free goes away. Any Google user has 15 gigabytes of storage (mail and drive). Photos added after June will count toward this limit. If you want more space you must pay for a Google One account.

I knew I paid a couple of dollars a month to Google for space and it turns out I already have a Google One account.

I purchased Google One because I was concerned about what I had stored in Google Drive. I was approaching 15 GB of Drive content. I must have the smallest account (100 gb), but I have lots of content stored.

Some thoughts on paying for stuff. In general, I think digital users should pay. The present ad supported model has resulted in problems concerning the collection and sharing of personal data and efforts by tech companies to attract more screen time from users. The mechanisms to increase screen time have manipulated our understanding of the world with the prioritization of attention grabbing mechanisms such as the prioritization of content suited to our personal interests and content more likely to generate an emotional response. Paying for a less manipulative service would probably be a good thing and the tech companies do need to way to generate revenue. The Google price model is reasonable.

From the other perspective, Google has employed typical big company tactics. Very much like Amazon, Google has undercut the price of competitors driving them out of business. I have no idea whether this was the long term intention, but it has worked out this way. Undercut competitors to close them down or buy them out and then raise prices. This is the type of thing the Commerce Department must address if we want to maintain the competition necessary for continued innovation.