Create your own Brand but stay in the Community
Jeffrey Zeldman, a pioneer of web standards and a longtime blogger, quite wrongly posted about the death of the personal home page.
In it, he critiques bloggers and webified folks alike for, perhaps, unwittingly giving away our content and “brand” to other third-parties.
We are witnessing the disappearance of the all-in-one, carefully designed personal site containing professional information, links, and brief bursts of frequently updated content to which others respond via comments. Did I say we are witnessing the traditional personal site’s disappearance? That is inaccurate. We are the ones making our own sites disappear.
Obliterating our own readership and page views may not be a bad thing, but let’s be sure we are making conscious choices.
He later concludes:
But outsourcing the publication of our own content has long-term implications that point to more traffic for the web services we rely on, and less traffic and fewer readers for ourselves.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Not every person who designs websites needs to run a personal magazine on top of all their other responsibilities. If your goal in creating a personal site way back when was to establish an online presence, meet other people who create websites, have fun chatting with virtual friends, and maybe get a better job, well, you don’t need a deep personal site to achieve those goals any more.
But if world domination is your goal, think twice before offloading every scrap of you.
The danger of thesis like this, and the danger of having a mind like Zeldman, is that it is only partially thought out. He needs someone to push and challenge him to build upon this to a greater expansion of applicability.
First, who is the audience? To whom is this written? For the fans of Zeldman like me, who are likely other webified folks, who create and use websites daily, this post may seem to make sense. But as we know from the web, everything lives in isolation; all content stands alone.
The vast majority of web users - those who are just discovering blogs, delicious, and Flickr - or who have yet to discover them at all (no thanks to Facebook) - can’t understand the value of having one’s own domain.
If they are on the net at all, they live, and are at the mercy, of these Web 2.0 companies, many of which Jeffrey refers to, and most of which have yet to turn a profit. As I’ve lamented several times, when we place our content in these trusted service providers, we had better make sure we trust them. If you’ve changed your email address over the years (Juno, Earthlink, Comcast, Concentric — ring a bell?), then you know the feeling.
What happens if/when Microsoft buys Yahoo? Where does delicious go? Flickr?
I even previously outsourced my creative writing to Booksie, which I now consider a mistake. I’m moving it to a new domain, lawrencesalberg.com, which will house my professional and freelance writing services shortly.
The example he gives of Jody Ferry’s site is a good example of someone who wants a brand, but not a product. And that’s okay for Jody. As Zeldman says, if you are busy working building websites, perhaps there’s no need for personal expansion beyond the obvious: a few tweets, some photos, your LinkedIn profile. Heck, for most people in America, even that would be a stretch.
Personally, I think when you are a leader (as is Zeldman), I think you not only have to lead, but you have to remain steadfast. This is a fine line. At what point do you abandon a platform you once helped to establish? At what point do you lead people away from, say…. Gmail, to something like Zenbe? Are you being a leader by being hip, new wave, and trendy? Or are you just isolating those who can’t even figure out how to keep up with the in’s and out’s of a feed reader still? I don’t have the answer, but I think you hold fast to those principles you once espoused as much as possible to allow as many folks as possible to follow suit.
That’s why I found Zeldman’s comments about Tweets so uninspiring. How is that we are discussing 140 word “blurbs” about the fleeting thoughts that pass through our brains in flashes of brilliance and frustration - and discussing that in some noxious paragraph that covers personal essays, journals, and posts? It’s unthinkable I would hope. The two can (and often do) live quite harmoniously. One shouldn’t replace the other. In fact, it’s impossible for Twitter to ever do so. I’ll leave aside the idea of having multiple Twitter accounts (friends, family, work, crazy thoughts, new discoveries), but it will never compare to the written word in essay form so often found on blogs (like this one).
Why would we encourage anyone to abandon that? Shouldn’t we, as a culture, particularly in America, be asking others to participate in a more greater way? Despite my very recent devastation with all things web, you might note I was careful not to propose solutions, but just to share the lament. I’ve been working and thinking about it greatly since then and will shortly put forth what I hope will be a positive step in turning the internet train wreck around before it’s too late. But I think I knew instinctively that the wrong thing to do would be to abandon the platform.
If Jody Ferry wants to put a few cold links to some other places on the site on his personal home page and nothing more (the equivalent of a decapitated WordPress sidebar), then isn’t that just nothing more than the purest expression of Jody Ferry, and not a pattern for others? Isn’t everything about that site speak of Jody, both pros and cons? Of course it does. As does my site speak about me (whether too voluminous, or too sparse, or too cute, or too green, or too flowery, or too full of technical jargon, or too promotional of community, or too absent from it). As does Zeldman’s, not forgetting his redesign of it only a few years back, speak heavily about him.
It isn’t just the words, or the links, or the design, or the absence of those things, it’s the whole picture: the domain name, the icons, the underlying code, the choices of authority (do I link to Wikipedia and cringe, or take the high road and link to Britannica knowing most don’t subscribe to it?), the page width in pixels/ems, the use of Flash, the use of API’s to bring content in - or the use of links to send people out. How I or you interpret any of that defines me, particularly more so if we’ve never met. What I place importance upon is, naturally, quite different from what anyone else will place importance on. We all do it - it’s quite natural.
“Boy, those are ugly colors” - “What’s with the super-wide view with the huge typography?” - “I love what he says about Star Wars being overrated” - “I wish this guy would offer full feeds”.
It all comes into play. There is no death of personal pages going on. In Zeldman’s busy world, maybe, and thus that’s his myopic and centralized vision of a trend he is seeing. But in the real world - away from the hubs of developers and designers - more content is being generated than ever before. Whether it’s done at LinkedIn or Zeldman.com/resume is largely irrelevant. What we should be embracing - and encouraging - is for others to follow suit somehow. We should be teaching them, showing them, and motivating them.
To say, “Ahh… why waste time with a personal site unless you are a megalomaniac?” is, I believe, the wrong message to send. Historically, it’s also highly inaccurate (and I might also point out - a bit hypocritical for a man who has done quite a bit of narcissistic personal site branding himself). Why shouldn’t the 47-year old retired stock investor rebrand himself online - and fiddle with WordPress and make his own photo galleries if he wants to? Or make a page like Jody’s and get involved with LinkedIn, PhotoBucket, etc.
It isn’t a right or wrong thing at all. It’s a question of whether we take moral high ground that is an isolated bare cold mountain top, or whether we stay among the people and help them out.
When you deal with real people, you find out quickly that they can barely figure out how to post their resume on Monster and apply for a job. They think you are a genius if you just show them and encourage them to have different resumes - or to use different cover letters. Watch them click on the “Join the Army” ads because they thought it meant “submit”.
We should be helping these folks - getting them on LinkedIn, developing their small business websites, friending them every six months on Facebook until they join, helping small businesses understand the benefit of blogging, and yes, if need be, showing them how to buy a domain name and start creating their own online brand… whether it be a full 1000-post blog, a tweet repeater, a link list, or a photo journal. Let it be a reflection of them so that the internet begins to represent a more accurate reflection of society, rather than it’s unbalanced favoritism toward tech types. We all benefit when that happens.
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This post was incredibly insightful. As one of the webified digerati, I’ve always found Zeldman to be bit of a bore. So, it was a real treat to see someone take him to task for something I instinctively picked up on, and was ultimately turned off by — his tendency to speak from a veiwpoint that always seemed shortsighted in the light of the greater internet. No doubt he is a rock star web designer, that part is never under question, but what is how much stock you put into his opinions vs. his technical prowess. But I digress…
I think you summed it up beautifully in your final statement:
Web 2.0 may be over for those at the bleeding edge, but unless you deliberately put yourself in the place of the new users — which we ironically do when performing client work, or building the next big thing — we will never be able to reap the full reward of our efforts. If you look at theories like ‘The Wisdom of Crowds’ it requires lots of different kinds of people with lots of different kinds of thoughts to have any hope at accuracy. The same is true for the cultural heritage that could and is stemming from this second web revolution. We only create a geeky echo chamber when we’re the only ones participating. The rest have to be shown the way, and once they’ve got a handle on the tools, their own expression will naturally emerge.