A rumination on blogging

The following may not surprise you, but it surprised me. When I took a virtual walk through the archives of bloggers who have been active since before the new millenium, I couldn’t help but notice that your average blog back then looked eerily similar to the twitter messages and the tumblogs of today. Very short, to the point. A log. Goes to show that acceptance of the medium by journalists and popular culture is, in a way, the result of the maturation of the genre. It’s not just about a change in perception in the eyes of the public. Twitter now takes the same flak that blogs used to take, because twitter does what blogs used to do.

Meg Hourihan spoke about the “traditional weblogs-are-links-plus-commentary-definition” in 2002, and that seems about right when we’re talking about the early blogs. Blogging has changed a lot since then, it would seem. To its betterment, I think. What’s really cool about blogging and about the internet in general is that countless people have become producers of content. But links and a bit of commentary — well, that’s more like sharing on Facebook, and I’m not really inclined to call that a substantial form of content and I don’t get really excited about it, even though it’s valuable in its own way.You’re producing content when you use Facebook, true enough, but I think that’s not what most people mean when they say users have become producers. Long-form blogging is another beast altogether.

So, blogs today are a lot different from those that defined the genre early on. Expectations are up. Longer posts, not just a bunch of links but your own take on things. Your own voice. Expectations are up, and correspondingly frequency is down. Few people can combine a day job with writing an insightful piece of commentary every day. And those that do risk repeating themselves, as they run out of ideas sooner or later. Enthusiasm is down as well. Blogging has become a chore for a lot of people. They may persevere because they’re a freelancer or a consultant and their blog has become more-or-less their resumé, a way to attract work. Or they keep chugging along, but instead of blogging every day, blog once every few weeks.

Last year at DrupalCon DC, Chris Messina (at least I think it was Chris!) asked the audience who was still blogging. A few hands in the air. He followed up that question by asking who in the room was using twitter and was excited about microblogging. Okay, suddenly I’m surrounded with people sticking their hands in the air. After which they tweeted about sticking their hands in the air, with those messages then appearing on a giant projected wall of tweets to the side of Chris. Because that’s what people at a web programming conference do. Anyhow, all joking aside, the popularity of twitter seems to stem from the same enthusiasm people used to have about blogging. Only now its possibilities are being grasped not just by the technically inclined but by a large bunch of moderately-web-savvy people.It’s the weblog of the olden days gone mainstream. Instead of comments you’ve got replies, instead of aggregators you’ve got hashtags, instead of mail you’ve got direct messages. There are few fundamental differences between old-skool blogging and twitter.

Blogs grew up, and something important got lost along the way. The spontaneity, the excitement faded away. Twitter, the tools for sharing on Facebook, tumblr, delicious and assorted other services have filled the gap.But I think we’ve gained something that’s even more important than what we’ve lost. Instead of just being producers of content in the meagre, web 2.0 meaning of that phrase, the blogs of today really do bring the voice of so many people on so many subjects out into the open. That is too important to give up. It is why I love blogs while I can’t seem to ‘get’ twitter.

The power of blogs is nowhere more evident than for software developers. As Rafe Colburn says: “blogging led to an explosion in the amount of information that was written by programmers for programmers”.It doesn’t have to be an or-or story, though. Twitter can exist happily alongside blogs in the programmer ecosystem, but twitter does not provide even nearly as much value to that system as blogs do. If you feel that the exciting new stuff you’re sharing, your thoughts or your opinion only warrant 140 characters, I can’t see why I should bother. What I’m looking for is thoughts and opinions.

I don’t care about links to new or otherwise exciting software projects, I care about your opinion about those projects: why is it useful, why should I use it, what’s your real-life experience using this? I don’t care about plain links to blogposts either, my RSS reader provides me with plenty of those and I’ve never had any trouble keeping up with the buzz machine. I care about your take and your interpretation of the stuff you’re linking to: why should I read that post, do you have anything to add, what are the most important points from your perspective?

“More work done in public, public discussion of that work, and the introduction of new best practices have defined the trend of the decade”, Colburn continues. This blog is my little contribution to that wonderful ecosystem we developers have created for ourselves.