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Blogging is not the end-all communications solution
posted at 2:31 PM  
Peter Ejtel came by and posted a comment on my entry "The "blogger market"; plus, a question for my readers". He clarified his position with Tucows and then went on to ramble about the current "revolution" (there's always a revolution, isn't there?).
I posted a reply that you might find interesting. In it I was finally able to quantify the reasons why blogging is troubling to me as a medium.
Comments
"Revolution" replaced "Paradigm Shift" as the buzzword meme... Thankfully! :-)
The biggest reason the free blogs are so prevelant is that it takes 7 bytes to store the word "passion" but 70KB to store the audio of someone saying it, and 200KB to store video of someone saying it. Text is super easy to store. You're very right that it's gonna take more bandwidth and bigger hard drives to store the information. I think the hard drives are getting there faster than the bandwidth though.
For me, I treat blogging as a diary, a record of my life and the things I think are interesting at the time. I've noticed that you tend to use it more to identify things that interest you (articles and what not), but not always to record your life experiences. Hmmm.... two things, mine is mostly an end-point getting there and stopping, your's is a starting point, getting there and continuing on...
And of course, right now we're using it like a forum or a public email that's constantly updated....
hmmm.... food for thought.
As well, 'meme' is a fluffy buzzword taken from Richard Dawkins' widely dismissed (in scholarly circles, though vulgarly popular) analogy between ideas, thus 'memes', and viruses in "The Selfish Gene." Unless your use of it constitutes a neologism that I'm not aware of, the use places you squarely in a Dawkinsian, deterministic camp of thought (which, again, isn't known for its nuance); I'd far prefer to be among the Gouldian school. But that's just me.
Well, slackv, I'd record my life experiences more if I was actually doing anything interesting ^^;;; That seems to be a theme in my life lately--me sitting around talking about stuff rather than doing it.
Bleh.
But anyway, I see my blog as a reflection of me and all the things I do, and I'm hoping to include more varied things, like writing projects and Japanese study, soon.
And yes, definitely, your reasoning explains why textual media are getting first dibs on the Internet. They won't be the last word, however!
Matt! I was just thinking about you today! Haven't heard from you in awhile :) How are you? I saw that you're running for Judge/Executive of McLean County...good luck to you!
(I hate the word "meme" ;D)
I knew you wouldn't like the word meme, because, linguisticly minded person that you are, there's another very good word for it: idea. And that latter example doesn't come loaded. Meme implies that ideas have agency. They do not. They are not like viruses. Viruses have genetic material. Ideas have nothing. The human mind is the only thing of substance in the entire equation. There are good ideas, popular ideas, bad ideas, and silly ideas -- there is no such thing as a meme. Yes, the Merriam-Webster has a definition for it. So, like 'Ain't', it's in there as a cultural relic -- not because it's intelligent usage.
PS: Things are going well. I am today trying to finish 2,000 words on my book, "The Unclean Cup: A Century of Filth and Faith in America," and I am running for judge/executive -- and we are going to win (you have to believe, or what's the point, but we do have a solid foundation). I have been reading your blog faithfully and I am about to offer you my opinion: go back to school (graduate school), even if you have to go into debt through student loans. Spend the next six months figuring out what you want to study and making applications. Most people in graduate school are 27-ish, looking for direction, but at least they're surrounded at the university by 'formal' discourse (blogs ain't that) -- and you'll come out with a degree. This is all my personal opinion, but I think you have the proper personality to be an academic/scholar because you'd be able to travel for conference and scholarly reasons, and you'd be taken seriously (I think that's something important to you and someting you deserve) and get paid to write books. It won't be easy, but at least it's a path and there's a clear reward at the end for you.
Although I don't know him, I second what Matt said. Go back to school. In a way it insulates you from that kind of self questioning and it's a whole lot better than being at home doing nothing. I'm 31 and I'm still finding out new things about myself, no I don't have "it" figured out either.
Yeah, I don't like the word 'meme' either. It's a made up word that has no meaning in my mind. So it's easy to use in any paradigm shift of conversation. Hehehehe.
True, but RSS WITH Blogging is.
I do agree that blogging in and of itself provides little value past an easy to use tool to get copy onto a web page.
Where I see the real power of blogging is in RSS, and how RSS combined with an easy to use content management tool like a blog has caused allot of activity and change in the way people are interacting with the Internet in the last year or two. Does that define a revolution? Probably not and more of word play on my part to communicate my point similar to the way you called my efforts ramblings and sleazy to communicate yours. It's all about the descriptives...
What I do agree with is the way you describe the need for a blog-like communication tool to allow you to post or comment in different multimedia formats such as photos, videos, paintings, songs, or just a recording of your voice all on a single thread, and due to the bandwidth and storage consumption not all of these are easy and cheap enough for the masses to use.
Being an active participant in the Internet industry for many years, one constant you can pretty much count on is that eventually everything becomes commoditized. Look at the efforts for the $100 laptop to see where things are heading. I just bought a top of the line computer that was about 500% more powerful than the one I bought 4 years ago, yet less than 30% of the cost with a better warrantee and support. I pay almost the same price for my 5mb broadband today that I paid for dial-up 6 years ago.
Eventually hardware and bandwidth will be effectively free or cheap enough to become disposable, where even today you will find microchips in toothbrushes and shavers that are designed to be thrown away after a couple of weeks. If you picture all of these moving parts combining you will see the fruition of your ideal in not a couple of years, but maybe even a couple of months. Our service supports 95% of what you mention although it isn't free, but at $5-9 / month it's cheaper than a cup of coffe once a day.
I can go into many specific examples of what I mean, from Itunes latest moves into podcasting, to what Yahoo and Google are doing with their acquisitions. Things are changing, and although this all may not be as revolutionary as other waves in Internet History, this will be the one that most impacts our use of the Internet every day.
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