As if to underscore my problem with Blogging, I began this post on my mobile phone - but because I couldn't finish it in time, and because no one wants to return to a blog post for updates - I never posted it and lost the draft when I closed the browser.
So how do we attack this personal mind-map/blog issue? As I alluded to earlier, I believe the solutions are already out there, but are yet to be brought together into a cohesive whole.
Some of the sites/concepts that I draw inspiration from:
1. Tumblr
In functionality, Tumblr hits the sweet spot between Twitter and Blogger - small atomic posts of a variety of data types. Tumblr encourages you to think of video and images as singular units of communication a la a blog post or tweet.
Tumblr is probably the home of the best user contributed design on the planet right now. Not that this is a design project per se, but check out this, this or this.
2. Wikis
That's Wikis in general, not Wikipedia as the most well known instance thereof. Wikis introduced the concept of versioning, collaborative editing and structured content. I find something exciting and informative about the ability to view the history of a document as it is created, mashed, spliced and refined. It adds weight and authority to the content and encourages relevancy and timeliness.
3. Facebook
Yes, I know it's terribly trendy to hate on Facebook at the moment (possibly justified, but), however Facebook lets you comment on everything. Which I happen to Like.
The idea that every piece of content - an image, an album, a status update, a new page - is something worthy of comment is a concept that is missing from blogs. Why can you only comment on the whole article? Why not the inset images or the video you've included? Why not the category tags or specific lines or - gasp - words.
Of course things are already going this way. YouTube allows you to comment on videos at specific frames, for example, so why not bring it to blogging?
4. Open Stuff
By which I mean:
5. Chrome Experiments
There are some really interesting experiments in browser capabilities here, but my favourite is also low-fi. Your World of Text is a persistant online text space. It has no boundary, anyone can edit it and it's fascinating to imagine how the idea could be extended to all sorts of applications.
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I have a problem. As a professional web developer I feel obligated to run some sort of website, if only to drape myself with a thin veneer of geek respectability. Inevitably that entails a blog, but history has tried to teach me time and again that I don't have the personality, patience or motivation to run one properly.
Maybe I need to learn something here. It's not that I don't have anything to say. On the contrary, I've got some pretty strong opinions about the state of tech that never make the leap from shouty beer fuelled bar discussion to the silent online forum.
I lieu of blaming myself, I got thinking: what is it about blogging that doesn't work for me? These are my thoughts.
1. Time Dependence
I've come to dislike the temporal nature of blogging. Do our opinions and thoughts change so rapidly that we can't stand by what we said yesterday, or revisit, refine and rethink our stated positions based on new information or experiences?
Given that those posts enter the historical record - if not on your owner server, then in the collective archive of Google and Co. - it is an extraordinarily fickle medium.
"Time" is the default sorting/association method between subsequent posts. Yes, it is an obvious default that exists out of convenience and made a lot of sense at the birth of blogging. You could assume that your followers had read previous posts, had some sort of common knowledge about what you were posting and would take charge of managing that 'thought update' process.
Since then, search engines have reduced the reliance on "time" and increased the reliance on "content". Readers are as likely to have arrived via a search term as by bookmark or RSS. Why not endevour to keep all content current - especially the content that people find useful over and over again?
Ultimately the question remains: just how should this information be ordered, interlinked and presented? That question can only be answered by the individual who is posted the data, but the "time default" has defined blogging and limited the usefulness of the content.
Which brings me to:
2. Categories
It would have been immediately apparant to the earliest bloggers that simply ordering posts by time wasn't enough. How do readers find similar or related posts back in the archive? How do we group information and make it easier to find? Categories were supposed to answer that question by allowing related posts to be grouped under different headers. There have been variations on the theme: tags provide a less rigid structure, for example, and a degree of automation has lessened the burden on the author.
Categories have never really solved the problem. The author has to decide what categories are useful to the reader. This forces them to use one of two strategies:
a) Shot-gunning as many potential tags as possible to try to cover all their bases, or,
b) Use a small number of broad categories and ask the user to trawl through the results.
Of course, neither strategy is ideal. Tag "clouds" that highlight frequently used terms attempts to improve the situation, but again, we're trying to solve a problem we've created for ourselves.
3. Interaction
One thing we've learned from social media is blogging is not social media. Comments on old posts are ignored, change is discouraged (it invalidates comments, for one) and the reader is usually forced to address only a small part of the original post. The alternative is for the reader to attempt to provide a long winded and complicated reply that has to refer back and forth between the original post and subsequent follow ups. There is no satisfactory way to integrate those comments with the content supplied by the blog author.
Comments are a poor way to communicate to your audience, and even less, are useless for building trust and two-way communication. There must be a better way.
What can be done?
I have some ideas that I will work through over the coming weeks. In summary, I believe all the problems listed above have been solved, albeit it different applications and capacities. It's time to pull those ideas back into the world of personal blogging.
The dream, therefore, is this:
To transform this blog into a constantly changing mind-map, where data is organised in an organic and fluid way that allows true interactions with an audience, that adapts to the needs of the individual reader, is amenable to change and creates a new engaging reading experience.
Like some sort of tiny bastard child of Wikipedia and Facebook. Who knows if it will work, but it will be interesting to try.
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