Stowe Boyd has posted another great piece that tackles the “blogging 2.0″ meme that’s floating around.
Like Stowe, I also started blogging in 1999. I was working on the personalization.com site (with Chris Locke and Steve Larsen), and Chris called me at home to tell me that he’d just seen a tool that “will change the internet as we know it.” That tool was Blogger (way back when Ev and Meg were running things out of spare bedrooms). Within days Chris and I had managed to migrate nearly all of the personalization.com website to sit on top of blogger — and, to the best of my knowledge, we were one of the earliest businesses running things on a blogging platform. It wasn’t all roses and love - there were plenty of times when Blogger went down, or my feeble programming skills managed to bork things beyond all recognition. Still, it was pretty wild back then — updating a site daily via blogging software. It was the “read/write” web — early.
Blogging went on to “grow up” - in a big way, and I’ve been blogging ever since (sometimes on as many as 4-5 blogs at once).
Like Stowe, my sense is that we’ve reached the early bit of a real transition point in blogging. And, as is usually the case, Stowe frames and phrases it much better than I can — talking about how the “web of pages” is moving into the “web of flow.” His point is beyond important — increasingly, my information comes to me via “flow applications” like Twitter. Simultaneously, though, I find myself appreciating (and reading) the more substantive and less frequent blog postings from people like Stowe or Scoble.
In the midst of all of that, comments are exploding into a distributed ecosystem. I love intense debate — comments are thoughtful, real and non-spammy, and I get to reply to them via all sorts of mechanisms. What I want now is to move into a truly distributed world where I can post and comment and read from within nearly anything and have it propagated accordingly. Example: I use NetNewsWire for my RSS feeds (have for years), and I’m realizing how tiring it has become to go to a web page to comment. I want to comment from within my reader. Is intense debate or NewsGator working on this? I have no idea, but I sure hope so.
At the end of the day, I think Stowe’s completely right when he says that we’ll move to an entirely new platform for blogging (and RSS and email and calendars and and and) - one that embraces the “flow” versus trying to silo it. You can see that reflected in a bunch of topics on the defrag agenda. It is one of those “big problems” that I’m so fond of - and one that I hope Defrag can contribute to solving.
Early Bird prices expire on August 15th — be sure to register now to take advantage of that — and come help us work on the growth of the web of flow.
