Polemic.

Solving the Blogging Problem

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:

• http://ostatus.org/
  
• http://openid.net/
  
• http://www.joindiaspora.com/
  
• ...
  

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.