I can't help but wonder if the blog, per se, is dead. Or at least dying! :-)
With the advent of Tumblr, and its quick-post, "recycle all" business model, along with Twitter and Facebook, not to mention Google+, it seems to me that the traditional [sic] blog is on its way out. Oh, it'll hang around for awhile longer, but the long form communication isn't well suited to many folk. I, for instance, find myself copying stuff from one to the other; the conversational style of Facebook sometimes spurring a blog post, but more often, these days, I lean toward expressing my thoughts on Facebook. (You can officially feel bad for my friends. :-) )
One thing I like about Facebook is that there's no "censorship"; if you don't like what someone says - you can say so. On blogs, you're subject to the whim of the blog owner. If they don't want their ideas and statements challenged, they can actively impose that upon themselves. The only compensation is that it (generally) has to be active censorship! :-) That they lose credibility is neither here nor there; in blogging the mantra is "no censorship". (It strikes me as silly that some, who object to SOPA, will censor their own blogs!)
Blogging, the short essay, will continue to exist; people do want a format that allows for the longer expression. But there's no particular need for it to exist as a distinct entity - unless that's what you want, of course.
The principle difference between blogging and Facebook, for instance, is the audience. A Facebook post has a limited audience, and a blog post usually has, to all intents and purposes, an unlimited potential audience. Honestly, a Facebook post is likely to be more widely read, however. The Big Blogs, the ones like Erik Erickson's Red State or Markos Moulitsas' Daily Kos, adopt a slightly different format. They're more like newsletters, with individual articles and varying writers; they may have their roots in personal blogging, but they are between newspapers and personal blogs. Those things don't lend themselves to a conversation style!
But things like Wordpress, Blogger, and the many other versions of those, are more than likely going to change; they'll have to stay relevant in the "conversation". On the internet, islands tend to get ignored! And the "comment here" format just doesn't work; if I make a pithy observation (it does happen. Occasionally...) I want to share it with my friends and in a wider forum - and right now, I can't. I could do the copy/paste thing, explaining the context of the remark and so on. That's too much effort, quite frankly. I want to hit a button that says "Share this with my friends!" They can see the conversation and my remark in its place. Right now - I can't. The long form of that is: I can't share it easily, and if I can't easily share it, I can't share it! Trite? Possibly. True? Certainly. As internet users, I think it's important to note that sometimes we want a discussion to remain within a certain audience; other times, we want to broadcast far and wide. And all stages in between.
So far I'm not seeing Google, never mind Wordpress - which, honestly, seems to be bent on recreating that "it doesn't work" feeling from the 1990's (and the design "sense" that afflicted the web back then) - making much effort to understand this shift. Google relies on data when it should be looking at Tumblr; Facebook makes no effort to understand the need for a longer-form entry. No one (except an obscure blog engine based on Symfony v1) does in-place editing. Facebook has their walled garden, Google has theirs, Tumblr has a fence and Twitter is trying to be a sparrow. At some point in the next few years, we'll start to see some of those barriers fall. Not least because people perceive their words as their words! Not Facebook's, not Google's, not Tumblr's. (Yes, I deliberately left Twitter out of that list.) No matter how I phrase the issue, I keep coming back to the central point: on the internet, islands either cease to exist or are consumed.
You think the internet is advanced now? It's barely out of kindergarten.
Carolyn Ann
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