Like classrooms in training, blogs will always be around. But also like classrooms, blogs are ceasing to be the primary source of value.
While I write a couple of public-facing blogs, Internet Time and the Informal Learning Blog, I spend more time participating in group discussions, writing comments, making online presentations, adding descriptions on sites like Flickr, posting to my wiki, and so forth. My blogs show but one of many perspectives of Jay.
Blogs are author-centric in a world that’s increasingly about relationships. Blogs are slanted toward me, me, me, me, me; the net is inexorably moving to us, us, us, us, us. Dialog trumps monolog.
Services like FriendFeed, Tumbler, and Posterous are essentially personal aggregators. Blogs gave each of us a personal printing press, but I want to express myself and interact with people outside of blog posts and essays. An aggregator enables me to create content with many different tools and in many different locations without the hassle of reposting links and what-not to my blogs.
Steve Rubel, Edelman’s tech trends guy, is forking his content from his blog to Posterous and a handful of other sites. I’ve followed Steve’s extremeley popular MicroPersuasion blog for years; he’s on to something important here. His blog is morphing into a “best of” collection of essays which he plans to update only a few times a month. Daily musings, photos, news, and links will appear in his Lifestream site. He Tweets links to new items and commentary. Everything shows up on Steve’s Friendfeed, including comments and discussion.
Yesterday, Steve pulled the switch: “It’s official; I’m moving from blogging to lifestreaming.”
I am considering following in Steve’s footsteps. I may re-focus Internet Time and the Informal Learning on articles and use Posterous as my main publishing stream.
By the way, I’m writing this post in Gmail. It will be automatically posted to Posterous. I’ll put a copy on Internet Time as I ponder where to go from here.
Any thoughts?
Jay, it is with a lot of respect for you that I must bark back and say that the view of a blog being mostly navel gazing is an extreme and narrow view of blogging; akin to saying twitter is only about sharing what you had for lunch.
My blog is not my aggregator nor everything social media, but an important piece of my personal ecosystem. The problems with rivers like FrriendFeed and Posterous (all marvelous technologies) is that they really lack coherency beyond flows.
The blog space is the one I truly own, and as much as I agree there is a shift to a more of an “us” space, you cannot have worthwhile “us” with people who have a strong individuality.
The demise of blogging in the long form, the reflection, the working out of ideas like working dough, is a loss.
I for one pursue the entire enchilda, and having both strong eprsonal space and a river flow gives multiple avenues of access and publishing.
And just for the record, for lunch I am having hot wings and seafood bisque.
Jay,
Well, the only forking I’ve been doing recently has been the earth in my allotment (I believe they’re called community gardens in North America) before I planted my runner beans.
Poor attempts at word-based humour aside, I believe that this forking business is fallacious (despite the attempts of your marketing acquaintence to imbue his decision to migrate with a wholly misplaced Frost-esque gravitas): it seems to me – correct me if I’m wrong – that the implication is that this is a Boolean choice: “either I blog or I lifestream.”
Mr Ruebel’s arguments are unpersuasive. I won’t analyse the page you link to, but it’s interesting that the first interactive element the reader encounters is a “back to blog” hyperlink: a Leo Bloom-style blue blanket for those readers who fear change, or a path back to the comfortingly familiar for Mr Ruebel? Who knows – you decide.
Anyway, I clicked on the link to Mr Ruebel’s previous domain, and groaned inwardly when I saw reference to Leonardo – “Oh no, he’s going to mention the notebooks and / or the helicopter” I thought, dismayed. We were spared the helicopter. However, sadly, we did get
“Da Vinci recorded notes, drawings, questions and more in his notebooks. Some of these were quite mundane (grocery lists and doodles), others were not. But the body of work was over time, a view of a one individual’s mind (in his case a great one).”
This kind of Derrida-influenced Post-Modernist mumbo-jumbo might have had currency 50 years ago, but surely not today?
Mr Ruebel continues:
“…we will learn about emerging technology trends together through links, images, video and audio. The difference though between this and a blog is that you will be right there with me as learn about and process new information, doodle about it in my online journal and and share/express my observations in real-time.”
Skipping right over the fact that any analogy between 500 year-old notebooks – the ultimate asynchrony – and the “real-time” promise above, this is exactly what a blog does, despite the assertion otherwise?
If there is any difference, I would suggest that it is that the filter has been removed; that is, the author’s effort to structure his thoughts meaningfully has been abnegated, and we, his audience, are expected to indulge the Great One as he dispenses nuggets of wisdom.
As I write this, a news ticker on Sky News Channel incessantly chugs by in the background, repeating heresay and speculation about the circumstances of Michael Jackson’s death, while a helicopter-based camera transmits images as it circles a suburban LA house, and newsreader tells us that “we’re” “live,” whatever that means.
This then, is the potential sound of undifferentiated media aggregation.
Good luck ‘moving house;’ you’ve obviously thought long and hard about lifestreaming and I’m sure the new platform will have value for you.
Alan and Michael, what I wrote was:
I’m wondering if the party isn’t moving on.
and
I am considering following in Steve’s footsteps. I may re-focus Internet Time and the Informal Learning on articles and use Posterous as my main publishing stream.
Actually, I haven’t thought long and hard about this at all. It’s just that Steve’s notion of focusing on everything rather than solely his blog caught my interest. As I wrote in my post, more and more of my work doesn’t appear in my blogs at all.
Alan, I take your point. Maybe what I’m after is refining my blogs by keeping what ought to be Tweets or Comments out of them.
Michael, when reading Steve’s material, it’s important to remember that he’s a PR guy, not a philosopher. The Leonardo post was a bit lame, I’ll admit.
Steve is not giving up blogging; it’s not either/or. He’s reserving his blogs for more reasoned articles and essays. At least, that was my reading of his intent.
As I reflect on this, I’m coming to see that the issue is where the value is. Frankly, I’m not sure where I’m going to end up.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
jay
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Kia ora Jay!
Good grief! First the Book, then the Training Materials. Now the Blog. There seems to be a pattern here and it’s speeding up.
Aren’t all avenues for written opinion a bit author-centric? We might just have to wait another 150,000 years for evolution to close the gap between the individual and the group when it comes to effective sharing of opinion.
Meanwhile, I’ll keep writing comments on blog post while the going’s good.
Catchya later
Hi Jay,
Great considered opinion. I think that there is a notion of life streaming that needs to be considered but I think the context will always be king as to whether we are moving down that path quickly.
Consider that it is the digital natives and immigrants that you are talking to when you express this opinion and then I would consider that in this context they can relate to the value of life streaming and what this means.
However we still need to understand why people self publish and why people subscribe. I do believe that there is a need to dive deeper into subject matter and gain greater clarity and understanding. The trend towards micro blogging prevents this and this could find us with less of an understanding and superficial learning concepts rather than a more “complete” understanding of that which we want to learn about.
It may be author centric but that is what the reader wants and appreciates. In this context it is still very much a valid medium.
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A great post
I would also love to have a real dialogue about this (and many other topics) online. With blogs it is not possible, neither with wikis I am afraid, and for sure it is impossible with the “stream posts”. Especially blogs and streams are “me!, me! Medias.
To have dialogue we need tools for dialogue. My best “sessions” of discourse online have took place in 1) newsgroups (pre Web), 2) mailing lists and 3) IRC / Skype and other chat services.
I think I (me!, me!) wrote something about this in my blog in 2007.
Here:
http://flosse.dicole.org/?item=beyond-blogs-and-wikis-i-want-better-tools-for-dialogical-teaching-learning-and-research
http://flosse.dicole.org/?item=blogs-wikis-and-knowledge-building-some-clarifications-and-comments
- Teemu
Well, I agree with everyone, but I can’t help thinking: what is so wrong with writing for yourself anyway?
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. ~Cyril Connolly
And the beat goes on…
This just in from Steve Rubel:
Immediacy vs. Reflection
My move from a blog to a lifestream format has elicited two kinds of responses so far: approvers and doubters. I don’t think this has anything to do with me, but rather it’s reflection of how we’re adjusting to the broader shift in media.
The web is slowly moving from an architecture of pages, to one that looks like a stream. Such models favor immediacy over reflection.
This was something John Borthwick from betaworks and I discussed this morning over breakfast. It’s definitely front and center in his mind
. Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Tumblr and Posterous are all platforms that embrace the stream metaphor
. Blogs, RSS, static news stories are remnants from the era of pages.
The stream is where the web is going. Does this mean thoughtful analysis is dead? No. However, the ubiquity of the stream and the tools to filter it, the increasing consumption of content on mobile devices and finite attention spans means there’s a greater focus today on immediacy than reflection. This was a major factor in why I shifted how I publish and embraced a tool that lets me contribute more in a streamed format, yet still have a home base on the web.
Perhaps I am wrong, but it feels like those who are most critical of the transition from blogging to lifestreaming perhaps are not ready to embrace such a format. Maybe there’s room for everything. What’s your view?
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