Steven comments that he’s reversed his feeling that everyone should have a blog (and pleeeeeeease get that page layout fixed!) and I agree… as we are using them (publication, conversation) they certainly shouldn’t. But, nonetheless, everyone should have a blog.
The problem is conceiving of blogs as we do as these public utterances to audiences of varying sizes. The same problem that whacked the ‘everyone should have a homepage brigade’ in 1997… we just didn’t need (or want) our own static CV.
But, as I danced around (thanks Tom :o) the other day on blogsavvy, the future of blogs is not as we see them now. Everyone may not want a blog, but blogs are becoming digital identities, digital homes and digital repositories.
Everyone does need a blog… we need to get over what we think blogs are and will become.
At SXSW last year I went to a panel on the future of blogs. Much of the discussion revolved around, essentially, web publishing for people who don’t like computers, don’t really want to write, and don’t want to publish, particularly on the web. That went on for a while, until someone capped it off with a comment from the audience pointing out that they had had the exact same conversation at SXSW seven years before (more or less).
We’ve been talking about this kind of thing since we started scribblin on caves tho… what I’m getting excited about / interested in is that it’s actually becoming possible in this context… now.
If you trawl back a few hundred years people had ‘identities’ within their social context. We have had no *real* identity on the web so far… it’s just starting to happen.
I like talking about the same things over and over again. To tell you the truth I wish people would spend more time considering the important stuff, getting over our collective ADD and all that!
At the very least, blogs as “outboard brains” seems an easy sell, and either things like clipping blogs in bloglines, or else just a straightahead furl account, seem like a reasonable place to start folks who will never go any further. It still allows them to provide some of their context in the shape of their collection (and maybe some comments), has an RSS feed, but isn’t as labour intensive or ‘public’ as a regular blog.
Yes, good point, the ‘blog paradigm’ that the tools present people with can be a bit challenging.