Three tier blogging4
This is gonna be the summary of a handful of notes I took after attending BlogTalk 2.0...
Three tier blogging is a concept that came to my mind during a dinner in Vienna: I was looking at all these famous bloggers from all over the world chatting and discussing about a lot of blog and not-blog related topics, and tried to compare their attitude with that of other bloggers I know... and suddenly realized, guess what, that there are different types of bloggers ;)
Then, looking for some way to identify common patterns of behaviour, I noticed a resemblance with a concept emerging staight from my past as a coder: three tier application design.
Three tier applications are made of three distinct layers, each indipendent from the others for what it concerns development issues, but that necessarily co-work together in order to make the application as a whole work in a modular and scalable way.
These three layers are often referenced to as Content, Logic and Presentation.
- Content is about data and information that has to be displayed. In computing, this refers to data access routines such as database connectivity and so on.
- Logic is about business logic that the application is supposed to perform on the Content in order to accomplish the application purpose.
- Presentation is about user interface and how the result of the Logic and Content layers are rendered to the user.
To simplify even more, Content is about pure data, Logic is about code and "how things work", Presentation is about aestethic.
So, in blogs (and bloggers alike) we find again this three layers:
- "content" blogs, mainly focus on the content and more than that, the meaning of what's in 'em.
- "logic" blogs, or "geek" blogs, mainly focus on tech aspect, usually with lot of toys, bells&whistles in 'em
- "presentation" blogs, where you find plenty of graphics / neat design and so on. Also, I consider part of presentation type those weblogs that put a lot of effort on creating relationship and light conversation topics (which is good, only different from other types).
What follows is a short list of discussion topics that I'd like to explode...
on the differences and borders
As a geekblood, I think to be part of the logic type, even if maybe quite a lazy element of it: actually my blog is full of little and not so little bells and whistles that tend to make this blog quite a complex toy.
If I think of a "Content" blog, Beppe Caravita's or Seb's come to my mind, while other journals like mathemagenic looks more "hybrid" (it does heavy use of nifty tricks like backtracking, topics...)
Then again, there are really balanced examples like Joi's weblog, which combines lot of geeky stuff, high quality content and neat graphics (complete with moblog, galleries, css magic and so on)... unsurprisingly, this is also quite a successful blog ;)
As a guess then, all blogs are just hybrid, and finding balance among these three components is a good step toward "success" of a blog.
But...
on the effect of three tiers on effectiveness of a blog
...actually most simple tools seem to be effective enough, so why bothering on making the best tools / designs?
and again, what are the effect of three tiered blogging on blogversations (weblog conversations)?
more to be brainstormed on this.
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Until quite the middle of the entry, I were wondering on a more "relational" point of view for the question.
I mean that I think that probably there are 3 tiers like you've described, but not in a mere "external" view but in a sort of "stream of knowledge" view.
So, there are Content log that brings out information, that isn't really commented or "reworked".
Then, this details are taken and put together, with some sort of logic in the blogs of the Logic tier.
Then, someone else took all these informations and put the knowledge in a "readable" form, for the "masses", on his/her blog.
I were wondering about this... is the information maybe in some ways taken, worked out and made readable, like pieces of a chain, like the tiers of the applications? :)
Great.
Actually I was just thinking of blog "classification", just as a reflection of their editors psychology types, but of course, if viewed from a higher perspective, you can see the whole process on a "per conversation" base instead of just a "per blog" scale.
You'll find interesting hints about blog conversation dynamics here (blogologue about...)
Apart from the deviation on the topic that I got previously...
"so why bothering on making the best tools / designs?"
I think this is a crucial point. Because I think that the best design is something that makes "feel simple something complex". If something is simple, it is made in that way... a bad design (Presentation) makes even the simpliest thing complex.
In another way, a good design could "bring" every complexity to a more natural approach and makes it easier to use, understand and interact.
Like you've said, a complex all-in-one weblog, well done, is successful.
Actually when I first read the topic of this post, I thought of something quite different. Turns out that you, as you said, saw the three tier model as a form of classification of different types of bloggers and blogs, while I immediately thought of something along the following lines: