so, i was persusing former feed editor-in-chief steven johnson’s new piece on blogging called
“use the blog, luke”
where he makes an important point about the potential of the blog form:
“The true revolution promised by the rise of bloggerdom is not about journalism. It’s about information management. The bloggers have the potential to do something far more original than offer up packaged opinions on the news of the day; they can actually help organize the Web in ways tailored to your minute-by-minute needs. “
steven then goes on to lament the fact that despite the promise we are once again drowning in the sea of content and linking produced by bloggers. this reminded me of the “conflux rhetoric” which is a snippet from a feed article that i posted over two years ago titled
“portrait of the blogger as a young man”
. i can’t confirm it because the original feed link is dead, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the article was written by steven. i liked it then, and now, because it struck me as being remarkably
prescient
in its description of the relationship between blogs and journalism and how it might take awhile for the form to crystallalize into something approximating orderliness [ and using the term “Web log” seems so anachronistic ] :
“”You’re not a designer, you’re not a writer, and you’re not an editor!”
Well, no, blogger, you’re not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it’s true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it’s also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.
…[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the “discovery” of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For
just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.” “
amusingly, just as i was going to post a “the-more-things-change-the-more-they-stay-the-same” style rant, i ran across
jason kottke’s reaction
to the article:
“The problem is that implementing a weblog universe-wide system of tags and categories is like herding lots and lots of cats. No one will agree on which tags and categories to use. If a de facto standard set of tags does emerge, getting people to implement it will be hard.”
the more things change – the more they stay the same.