Interesting to see the backwards looking pronouncements coming through. Matt talking about the Resonance retrospective on blogging. As Eden said to me the other night, the crucial literature of the early nineties is found in TWANBOC / Woebot, K-Punk and Heronbone. But I think the centre of gravity has moved away from blogging and back to forums. There are too many good blogs to keep up with, and people are going back into communities where there’s enough audience to feed off, and where the networking and inter-communication thing can work better. Dissensus is the obvious example and very good it is too. In fact the limitation of Dissensus is that it’s just a forum, when most of the members are experienced bloggers; a new kind of forum might be needed to better exploit the assembled talents.
But this isn’t the end of blogging; it’s just a natural dialectical process. Blogging will reassert itself when people balance the long-threads + chit chat of forums with the chunky personal statements only a blog can do. There are too many blog entries and not enough that are really substantive.
Funnily enough I think the blogs that are leading the way here are the ones that got it right in the first place; they are expert in set pieces, while also specialising in the personal and the ephemeral that fall between the cracks of forums.