“A pretentious and presumptuous attempt to document what bloggers have learned, without any formal instruction, to do every day.
And then a description of what’s needed to make blogs a medium for real conversation.”
I agree with Sebastien Paquet, this post is well worth reading. Pollard’s diagram captures what I think a lot of the previous efforts to define ‘what is a blog’ miss out; we should be focusing on the entire activity ‘blogging,’ with its many surrounding phenomenom, and not just the end product, a ‘blog’.
But where I think I depart from Pollard is that I’m actually pretty happy with the ‘conversations’ that the blogosphere is currently enabling. Actually, to be fair, I think a lot of the developments he’s talking about (e.g. taking blog-spawned discussions into a proper threaded space) make some sense. But I don’t necessarily agree that the effect of meeting fellow bloggers in a different medium shouldn’t be ‘jarring’ – I believe the medium has its own effect on our communications and *how* we communicate, and in the case of blog-based ‘communication’ I think some of these effects are very desireable. Blogs allow *my* words to show up in *your* space (your aggregator) without any confusion that they are *your* words. And unlike email, I can choose who I am listening to (you can of course choose not to open emails, but less and less it seems can you choose whom you receive them from). There’s more, there’s always more, but home I must go…
– via [Seb’s Open Research]