1 September 2007:
There's been an interesting exchange in The Guardian
about blogging and journalism: first, Scott
Rosenberg heralding "the unique way in which
blogging has redrawn the line between private communication
and mass publication", then Nigel
Jarrett's letter this morning saying that there
is a confusion of medium and message: "blogging
is like writing to a newspaper knowing that your letter
will be printed, whether you are dumb, weird, cranky,
illiterate, the undiscovered brain of Britain or plodding
Mr and Mrs Average".
I think they actually agree, in the sense that they
come back to the point that it all depends, as with
all technologies, on how you use it. Rosenberg asks
why dismiss all blogs and bloggers when you don't
have to read them anyway, Jarrett says a lot of them
aren't worth reading. As, no doubt, a "plodding
Mr Average" myself, I rather think that's what
I said in the first place - right at the bottom of
this page.
And as such, I've started blogging myself. And yes,
I was rather prone to writing to newspapers....
August 2007:
Oh all right, I give in. The ease of the pre-packaged
formatting is rather the point - for the reader as
much as the author.
And, although a blog might well be one person's ranting
into the void, it's fascinating how they become part
of - or perhaps they start as part of - a community
of people interlinking to each other's comments on
each other's blogs, so there's not a lot of difference
from a messageboard.
Yet another form of convergence.
January 2005: Well, as is the way of things, blogging
found its place pretty quickly: as a pre-formatted
online journal, it offers a form of communication
familiar from pre-online days, making it quicker and
easier for people to communicate directly and personally,
without the mediation of other editorial priorities,
whatever a journal - or journalism - can communicate.
My initial sniffiness (below) overlooked exactly the
benefits of that familiarity.
So blogging has made an impact as a source of first-hand
on-the-ground reportage in dramatic and fast-moving
events, such as the Asian
tsunami and the Iraq
war, but also on everyday realities in particular
jobs, such as the
police, or the
NHS (though there has been much speculation as
to whether the more eye-catching professional blog
is a
work of fiction). Clearly it helps communities
of interest to keep up with each other's occasional
notes on new developments and ideas, and it's been
used to
'pre-edit' a book (on blogging, of course) - I'd
be interested to see how soon it could start to shade
into formalised academic colloquia on ongoing research
(no
doubt it already has). And you can use it to save
on holiday postcard bills and (with a digital
camera) the slide-show evenings of old.
(No apologies for so many links to The Guardian:
it covers the blogging phenomenon in some detail).
What I thought two years ago:
'Oh yes, I've looked at your site'.... someone I
was meeting for the first time had taken the trouble
to look it up! But pleasure gave way to alarm, as
I realised I hadn't looked at it, for quite a while.
Time for a review and re-jig. Time to recognise my
own unease about the vaIue of a site about me, as
opposed to the things I'm interested in that other
people might want to know.
All this coincided with a lot of newspaper
attention on 'blogging', which I found mystifying -
how was this supposedly amazing new thing different
from any other personal website or homepage?
The distinctive feature of blogging is journal-style
entries, in chronological order. What's caused the
fuss is form-based updating through the Web, as developed
originally by Blogger.com,
which
- allows you to do without a direct dial-up
or network connection to the host
- offers
self-assembly pages, requiring no knowledge of
HTML
- allows you concentrate on what you want to say rather
than on the slog of creating a look for it.
Clearly there's a value in being free to concentrate
on content rather than coding, but I'm still amazed
at the fervour
with which some people regard a relatively constraining
format. For them, the medium is the message because
it makes the author the message, almost irrespective
of whether the message has any meaning. In the mobile
phone era, it's not just the disturbed who walk along
the street proclaiming their private discontents and
fantasies: but more opportunities to communicate don't
of themselves communicate more worthwhile content.
No surprise to find a columnist
celebrating the opportunity for self-published commentators
- but anyone who reads Private
Eye knows
that there are columnists and columnists. Sure
enough, one blogger has already described someone
else as the 'Glenda
Slagg of the blogosphere'.
Likewise, I wasn't the first to the idea that, nowadays,
Mr
Pooter might be a blogger, nor that there's a
similarity to the Christmas
newsletter. Websites, whether automated blogs
or lovingly hand-crafted websites, at least don't
arrive uninvited. But, like the Christmas letter (and
this site too, no doubt), they can provide examples
both sad and hilarious of self-absorption without
self-awareness. Pooter, on the other hand, was a conscious
fiction - just one among many 'self-revealing' humorous
characters (Lady
Addle, Augustus
Carp, AJ
Wentworth), not to mention the 'unreliable narrators'
of more ambitious novels. There are bloggers self-conscious
enough to call themselves 'unreliable narrators',
and no doubt there are writers using blogs to develop
modern-day Pooters (if I could be bothered to look).
Incidentally, my web searches reveal that 'pooter',
for some people, is a cute nickname for their computer
- I wonder if they know there's that extra resonance...?
It's the focus on someone's stream of consciousness
I find strange. I don't think I work all that hard
nowadays, but after working, commuting, eating, housework,
reading books and keeping up with what's going on
in the world, it's hard to find the time (and the
temerity) to just witter on to the world at large.
Organising your thoughts, on any basis other than
'and another thing', takes even longer. What do all
these people do all day?
I have no problem with the format
appIied to a subject, as another way of organising
an information resource, and I've added a coupIe
of interesting links above, including one to an enthusiast
for the power of blogs in developing online communities.
However, to me, linking parallel monologue message-boards
seems a bit too haphazard, too unfocussed: I'll be
interested to see how useful it is to this
group of NGO knowledge managers.
Perhaps this is no more than a variant on the debate
over hierarchical vs. 'natural language' retrieval,
perhaps there's a deeper and more personal issue over
the balance between the functional and the personal
in relationships. My niggles about 'community' and
the Net are for another time, another page.
As I might have expected, within a short while of
writing the above, the Net has thrown up something
new to make me think a bit harder. (A blog would make
updating easier, but would it also make it easier
to avoid some necessary re-thinking and re-writing?).
Phil Gyford's Pepys'
Diary project uses MovetableType's facility to
include
comments/footnotes to a blog and to explore links
between blogs. This could be an off-the-peg means
to support collaborative research and the development
of new communities of interest/practice.
Provided, of course, that there's a clear focus to
the activity (such as Pepys's Diary offers). It's
an open question how much thought might be needed
to develop a useable information architecture to keep
tabs on expanding notes and links in projects that
don't come with their own pre-established structure.
(Looking at Phil's different blogs and sites brings
me back to an earlier point - where does he find the
time?).
For me, the essential point remains: not to take
the format as a given, but to think hard and long
to define what you want to apply it to. Otherwise,
as so often on the Web, Gresham's Law applies - and
more, in the end, means less.