As usual, one of our friends has succinctly captured the heart of an issue far better than we can. Gunnar, while flattered to be considered for a Security Blogger Hall of Fame award, takes the opportunity to discuss the drop in real conversation as the Tweeter has taken time and attention from many folks who used to hold those real conversations in blogs.
Why I would really like to see the scene keep making progress is that I think security is an industry where its easy to get lost in the urgent and forget the important. Its a non stop flow of urgent operational issues, but not much time to look at – why does this keep happening and how do we fix it or stop it from recurring? These are things you cannot do in 140 characters, and we need something between a Tweet and a Whitepaper to have an industry conversation. Blogs fill that space very well, look at the issues, consider the deployment options, integration concerns, and what we might realistically do. These are the conversations we need to have.
That is the reason we chose the Securosis blog as our main content vehicle. It gives us an audience and a mechanism to interact with thousands of folks, without building a large sales force and go-to-market engine. And for a few years it worked great. A business like Securosis (or Security Incite, for that matter) couldn’t have existed in 2003. But we have definitely felt the same drop-off in conversation on our blog. The number of comments we get on our blog posts is far lower than it used to be. Yes, we have some of those conversations in 140 character chunks via Twitter, but it has been a long time since we had more than 2-3 comments on any post.
Of course we have adapted to stay relevant, as every organization needs to adapt to market realities. We accept the increasingly serious ADD we all suffer from, and now do much shorter and more frequent posts (like this one). We automagically tweet a link to every post to make sure the echo chamber doesn’t miss anything we write. And most of important, we accept that the way things are may not be the way we would like them to be.
But kudos to our friend and contributor Gunnar for at least forcing us all to acknowledge how things have changed.
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One Reply to “Getting Lost in the Urgent and Forgetting the Important”
“These are things you cannot do in 140 characters, and we need something between a Tweet and a Whitepaper to have an industry conversation”
I am really hoping that we will see a stable platform similar to Google wave that can bridge the gap between a blog comment and a tweet to engage in that 1:1 conversation and still have a conversation flow.