Blog Visibility

Heather Green blogged Interesting interview with Mena Trott, co-founder of the blogging software Six Apart over at the Red Couch.

She came by and spoke with us about a month ago. And one of her insights that stuck with me was the notion that, over time, people will get more control over who sees their blogs. They will be able to make different parts of their blog private, so that they're open only to certain people. This is already happening to some extent at LiveJournal, the service that Six Apart bought in January.

Afterall, maybe you don't want your co-workers to read what you really think about them. It will be one of the ways that blogging morphs to deal with thorny issues, such as privacy and work guidelines on what you can blog. But it will also bring up questions about whether limiting conversations is truly blogging.

Mena Trott blogged The small group space is the next part of the blogging revolution. Most top-ranked bloggers focus on mass audiences, but most people are more private than the massively followed so-called A-Listers she observed. There's a reason not everyone is a journalist. Most people don't care. They use blogs for these small little projects.” (In fact, the idea of niche media vs. mass media is a fast-emerging concept. Radiant Marketing’s Paul Chaney commented on it in a post.)

Stowe Boyd blogged Over at Blogspotting , the new Businessweek blog on blogging, Heather Green explores an insight from Mena Trott: "over time, people will get more control over who sees their blogs. They will be able to make different parts of their blog private, so that they're open only to certain people. This is already happening to some extent at LiveJournal , the service that Six Apart bought in January." The full socializing of social media waits for the full integration of the buddy list: being able to specifically label each blog entry with the specific circle (or circles) of buddies you want to be able to see it, up to and including the whole world. [Note: technologies like Traction Software already provide these sorts of access control -- it just hasn't shown up in Moveable Type or Typepad yet.]

Drew commented MindSay actually lets you have 3 groups of networked friends and family members, letting you choose which group you'd like to post to, also giving you the feature to make individual posts private.

In my Comparison of Blog Services article, in the section on Yahoo 360, we see that you can make your blog visible to just your friends, or you can broaden it to include friends of friends, or even friends of friends of friends, if you don't want to make it visible to public (everyone).