Les Blogs: What are These Blog Things, Anyway?
One of the most interesting lessons from Les Blogs is that even world-renowned blogging experts have a hard time defining what the hell a blog is.
This question was posed directly to the day’s first panel and resulted in a variety of somewhat imprecise or contradictory responses. I think that Barak Berkowitz of Six Apart made the best effort, claiming that the key aspects that characterize blogs are their persistence and asynchronicity. He explained that email seems asynchronous, but is in fact simply “slowly synchronous” (or something like that), meaning that there is a strong chronology attached to emails. If you don’t respond within a certain time period, the other party will assume that you aren’t going to. Blogs, on the other hand, can be usefully commented on years after an entry is posted.
Caterina Fake of Flickr/Yahoo made the interesting claim that, in a few years, everyone will have a blog. The problem with this statement is that it is either obvious or absurd, depending on how you interpret it. If she meant that everyone will have some sort of human-readable online identity, fair enough. But is it really useful to define a blog so broadly? And if she meant that everyone will be keeping an online journal, that strikes me as very unlikely (and probably undesirable).
In the closing presentation of the conference, the inimitable Doc Searls took up the challenge. His talk began in intriguing fashion as he outlined what is essentially a loophole in the First Amendment, allowing the FCC to censor “offensive content” despite the protection of free speech guaranteed by the Constitution. He then discussed the various “borrowed vocabularies” (i.e. metaphors) that we could potentially apply to blogs: shipping (”delivering content”), real estate (”building” a web “site”) and writing (”authoring” a web “page”). He stated outright that he considers the latter to be the most apt, but never squared the circle to explain why this would protect blogs from FCC-style censorship. Very entertaining stuff, but it didn’t bring us any closer to understanding what distinguishes a true blog from other superficially blog-like stuff.
I have an opinion on this: blogs are the future of journalism, pure and simple. In this respect I agree with the idea of “citizen journalism” promoted by Dan Gillmor and others. There are a number of obvious characteristics that distinguish the average blog from the average magazine or newspaper article. Blogs are generally one-man shows, delivered online, not that polished and available for free. Traditional journalism tends to involve a team of writers, editors and designers producing printed, professional-quality text that costs money (directly or through advertising).
But these boundaries are blurring fast. Imagine that we were to plot the prototypical amateur blog at one end of a multidimensional space whose axes represent team size, quality, cost, etc., and then place the most careful crafted Financial Times article at the other hypercorner. I believe strongly that the space in between will fill up over the next few years until a continuum forms between these two extremes. The whole space won’t fill up, of course, since quality and cost will remain highly correlated (schlock amateur content, for example, is likely to remain free). But online content will increasely dominate its printed brethren and will run the gamut from awful to fantastic, from free to quite pricey. Teams will form on an ad hoc basis and much, much more journalism will be created by talented individuals working alone.
And thus the notion of the blog will disappear, to be replaced by what preceded it: plain old articles of news and opinion. And we’ll wonder why we ever chose to place blogs in a category by themselves.
[lesblogs]
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