The blog model must change

I have reached the conclusion that the "blog model" has got to change, if it's going to survive. Expectations need to change, activities need to change. Everything needs to change about our assumptions about blogs, if they're going to persist and make the world a better place to live (which I actually believe they can).

As I see it, the ease of publishing with a blog is a two-edged sword. It's almost too easy to put more content out there, and with Firefox extensions like "Blog This" and "BlogIt", what's to keep anyone from ceaselessly adding to the stream of fresh content, as they surf the web.

Only problem is, the very act of blogging takes you away from the content you're perusing. Maybe that doesn't matter, if you're at the end of a simply news story about some topic or other that's not particularly deep. Maybe being pulled off-topic for the 20 minutes or so it takes you to add to your blog, isn't such a big deal. But if you're mid-way through a fairly complex piece of information, and you get pulled away to blog your initial thoughts, before you've gotten to the end of the piece, you stand the chance of not only missing all the points of the original piece you're referencing, but also not deepening your own understanding... which ultimately (after repeating the exercise of superficial reactiveness) results in a lack of depth... and a lack of true expertise.

I can't speak for anyone else, but that spells trouble for me. It invites a sea of superficiality, of fatuousness, of factitious posing that serves no one, not even the conceits of the writer who loves to hear themself talk.

That spells trouble for blogging.

Granted, there are few places you can find better cutting-edge news about cutting-edge issues and technologies than the internet. But noplace is discernment more necessary than there. Watching the blog enties about AJAX and Web2.0 is like watching a school of fish or a flock of sparrows dashing and darting this way and that, in the water or on the wing. People pick up on a topic and they run with it. Just run with it. Because they can. Because they're all pumped over it. Because they read about it in a blog -- especially a famous person's blog -- and they want to be part of the action. They come across a new vocabulary, a fresh new perspective on a fairly tired concept, and they clutch at that.

Junkies. We're all junkies. We need our highs, online, and blogging lets us get them -- not only in the reading, but in the writing, as well.

For what can be headier, in this time of plentiful anonymity and the erosion of personal freedoms, than having the ability to tout your own viewpoint to the universe? Blogging offers the chance to be seen by hundreds, thousands, millions even, and when you're sitting in a cubicle in an anonymous maze of veal pens, serving The Man to make ends meet, well, blogging is that set of wax-and-feather wings that can lift you above your career path prison.

Just watch out for the sun...

Too many bloggers don't, of course, and we end up with an Icarian sea of blather that serves no higher purpose than distracting people and impressing them with how many different ways a whole herd of people can say essentially the same thing. That's a problem.

Because ultimately, people will seek out substance, when the rosy glow of newness has left the blogs (and the podcasts) of the world. When blogs cease to be the curiosities that they are -- and probably will be for another few years, at least -- what will we be left on the servers of the world.

I mean, seriously. Words take up space. Ideas take up space. And in another five years, when all the billions of blogs in the world have reached a critical mass of storage capacity, what will the system administrators of the world do?

Start deleting. That's right. Cleaning up. Nobody wants to have to maintain stale content that was relevant ten years ago, and is now just a collection of vain prattle. But will the sysadmins of the world excercise discernment in what they remove, when they remove it? Doubtful.

Editorial is not their core competency. In another few years, we can start waving goodbye to a bunch of blogs.

Bloggers beware -- nobody's going to ask your permission ahead of time. Oneday, your archives will just be gone. Kind of like two-month-old email from your corporate e-mail account "sent" folder.

Is all to be lost, then? I do envision perhaps another option -- that people start picking and choosing what they put out there, so we don't end up with this glut of duplicate and ego-driven information. It may be too late to turn that tide, and I suspect that there will be some sysadmin attrition taking place before too very long. But we can make it a less worthy exercise for them, if we can show that our blogs actually contribute to the greater good, and therefore they should leave well enough alone.

And in the process of improving the quality of our offerings, we'll give serious readers something more to take in, than our fatuous repetition of half-baked concepts. We'll actually be able to publish material worth reading and worth keeping. And bloggers (some of them, anyway) will slowly but surely veer away from being herd creatures, to being independent thinkers with quality content that others find interesting and engaging and worth saving.

In the meantime, back up your blog content and have a care before you post willy-nilly. Discretion ins the better part of wisdom, and we could use more of both on the web, these days.