Many people who have blogs say that it’s their main social network. They interact with the commentators. They discover their blogs and enlarge their network of interesting blogs.

The interesting fact about blogs is that they aren’t centralized. So the blogger controls the information it publishes. Whereas in Facebook, only Facebook controls the information you publish. I think that with a few more functions and a dedicated interface, blogs could replace Facebook.

More opened an decentralized discussions

When someone starts a discussion on a blog, it would be interesting if other bloggers could continue the discussion in both their blog, and the original blog. Trackbacks are used for that now, but they are very too limited.

The best would be that your comment on the original blog transforms into a post in your blog, ande discussion would then continus simultaneously in both blogs. The audiences of both blogs would be merged and the discussions would become more interesting.

A Facebook-like administration panel

Many blogs already have a list of top commentators, a list of the most interesting blogs… But to transform a blog into a social network, we would need a list of commentators like the list of firends in Facebook.

It would be interesting too to be able to follow from the administration panel the last posts in the commentators’ blogs, like a Facebook news feed.

Plugins to manage pictures, events… would easily replace the most interesting Facebook functions. And we would have a decentralized network, where the users could control their data.

We could too imagin a platform like WordPress.com that would allow you to create a social blog as easily as you now create a Facebook profile. Myspace or Skyblog have features that look like social blogs, but they don’t allow to host a blog on an external host, or to have decentralized discussions.

Realisation?

I’m hesitating to create a wordpress plugin and perhaps a small social blogs platform. Perhaps ideas like that already exist?

Il est évident que cette vision des blogs ne serait pas adaptée à tous les blogs : les blogs thématiques par exemple n’ont pas grand chose à voir avec les réseaux sociaux.

Obviously social blogs couldn’t completly replace all usual blogs, but only the ones focused on the blogger.

But I think blogs could be a more interesting, more open, and more secure social network than Facebook, because we could use our own host for our data.