Push vs Pull Publishing

Everyone’s already written their thoughts on Quora. I’m a little late. Oh well.

Having casually blogged for more than seven years now, my first thought was that Quora was a new model for content generation—pull. Traditional media is push—they tell you what they think you probably want to hear. Blogs are also push. Quora, however, is pull—people ask questions and wait for someone to tell them the answer. I as a publisher don’t have to sit around and wonder what people want to hear.

This could be a huge boon from a blogging perspective. Most small bloggers don’t have the time/resources/know-how to select topics that will get them the most traffic. Does that mean that Quora, or other services utilizing pull models, could potentially challenge push-based blogging?

I really don’t think so. At least not in the form we see currently.

• Blogs are personal identity tools as much as anything else, and your ability to depict your own personal identity is significantly limited in a world of strongly typed content. 
• Bloggers that really care about traffic also care about advertising revenue. And revenue is always maximized when you control the entire experience.
• Bloggers that don’t care that much about traffic (trust me, there are plenty of us) write primarily for ourselves. Do I hope that some people see what I’m writing? Sure, but I primarily select topics based on what I want to write about.

The entire question seems like somewhat of a straw man in retrospect, but I really did wonder at the outset we were observing an disruption of the blogging publishing model. What’s more interesting than the “no” answer above is what this thought exercise tells us about where the Q&A model could go in the future. 

Giving authors tools to manage their own identities and generate revenue will shift this equation. I’d love to see a Q&A service that allowed you to write questions and answers on your own property and provided aggregation.