Over at How to Save the World, Dave Pollard
looks back on the most important ideas in the weblog world in 2003. He touches on the big debates -- abandonment rates, power law distributions -- and the big technology splashes -- social networking, RSS.
The only item of his 10 that I take issue with is #8: "The culture of blogging is evolving faster than the technology."
Dave says
The frustration of bloggers with the tools available to them is palpable. That's not the tool designers' fault: They operate on a shoestring and their 'customers' all want something different. They'll eventually build tools that are both simple and flexible, as both the technology, and the understanding of its use, mature. In the meantime, impatient bloggers are working around the impediments, learning about HTML and CSS themselves. This is World of Ends innovation at work, producing a proliferation of new blog 'products' and hybrids. [...]
What's happening isn't a simple case of the technology being behind the practice -- the two are diverging more radically than that.
There was a halycon period (between, say, the launch of blogger and the launch of Gawker) when the definition of a weblog, weblog technology, and the actual interconnected mass of weblogs were all of a piece. When someone asked "What's a weblog?", you could point to Instapundit or Talking Points Memo or the recently updated list on blogger and say "There, that's it, that's a weblog", without having to specify whether you meant the technology driving it, or the actual blog itself, or the abstract notion derived from the two.
Those days are over. Weblogs (the technology) have become the premier lightweight publishing platform, and make no requirements that the users of that platform respect or even know about weblogs (the communal practice). The only thing in common among
Jeremy Hylton,
Dave Barry,
Howard Dean's campaign, the
US Navy's procurement officers and
the_d00shbag over at LiveJournal who just quit his job at KFC, is that they all use weblog software.
Weblogging used to mean, roughly, "daily personal publishing, with an emphasis on conversational annotation of links", and the software was originally designed to match that pattern. Now weblogging means "stuff people do with weblog software", and those uses are far more various than the pattern Jorn Barger named and Rebecca Blood described. It's not just that the tools are not catching up to practice, though that's happening. It's also that past practice no longer defines the uses the tools are being put to or the features that are being added, a split that's going to accelerate in 2004.
1. Ken Schafer on January 7, 2004 5:40 PM writes...
A timely post Clay. Just today Mark Hurst posted his "Five Ideas For 2004" (http://www.goodexperience.com/columns/04/0107.five.html)
Idea 4 is "Blogs are just content management systems."
Permalink to Comment2. Dave Pollard on January 7, 2004 7:25 PM writes...
Ken: Damn. There goes my idea for next week's sequel: The Best Ideas for 2004. I especially like Mark's IDEA 5: Managing one's bits is an increasingly essential skill. (Similar to the concept of Personal Productivity Improvement I posted a paper on last month).
Permalink to Comment3. Tom Coates on January 9, 2004 4:59 PM writes...
Hm. Actually couldn't disagree more. I can see what you're saying, but if anything it's going the other way. The early paradigms were all over the shop with people doing all kinds of random things with them, to the extent that it was a truism for ages that you couldn't easily define weblogs except in terms of things people were doing with the software. Rebecca Blood spends 25 pages explaining roughly what a weblog is and what it means at the beginning of the Weblog Handbook published around two years ago, even trying to narrow down their functions to Blogs, Notebooks and Filters and talking about the various ways people were using them up until that date and how various types manifested and competed against each other or complemented each other.. Maybe there's been a bit of a les confusing period since the book, but I'm not sure you could pin it down particularly easily. After all while three years ago there weren't many (any?) commercially funded weblogs, but there were certainly specialist and semi-professional ones - Romanesko and the like were prime examples. I'd say if anything the type of activity that happens on weblogs has consolidated a lot with the last major shift being the arrival of the warbloggers who dragged the function away from sites based around the expression of an individual's interests and further towards subject-based news commentary. It's still fairly easy to state that a weblog is site organised primarily by reverse chronology most often by individuals posting links, commentary and person opinion pieces.
Permalink to Comment4. Clay Shirky on January 9, 2004 7:39 PM writes...
"It’s still fairly easy to state that a weblog is site organised primarily by reverse chronology most often by individuals posting links, commentary and person opinion pieces."
Right, but that's becoming less easy with each passing year. That doesn't apply to a lot of the in-house work on the part of big organizations, or the rise of the group weblog, or the use of weblogs as sysadmin tools, or weblogs as publishing platforms for political campaigns.
I am betting, in other words, that the uses the technology gets put to, in the next year, are going to make the above quoted statement, already less true at the end of '03 than '02, even less broadly applicable by the end of '04.
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