When Dave Winer started blogging, he used to have two forms. Some would be the long form essay, some would be the short form sentence. His blogging platform encouraged you to build up a day's journal entry from a mix of the two.

Then everyone took the long form essay and said "That's Blogging". The platforms encouraged people to think in terms of posts rather than a Day's Journal. So a Blog post became 20 to 50 lines of text.

But the need for the short form didn't go away, until along came Twitter (and Facebook Status). Suddenly here was a platform that encouraged (and enforced) the short form micro-blog.

So now we have two systems doing essentially the same thing. Providing a platform for the Blog Monologue one encourages essays, the other encourages the short snappy comment and link.

But they're both One to Many Monologue Publishing. Inevitably people also want the One to One Conversation and the Few to Few Group Discussion. So we try to bend the systems to make them do that. Twitter adds function for the @name convention. Pownce builds in "Reply" functionality. Blogs have this love hate relationship with comments as it veers from useful to poison to spam and back again with still no way of tracking multiple comment discussion across multiple blogs.

And each system is still amazingly bad at providing alternate communication methods to a particular person. So I find myself seeing a Twitter post and wanting to start a full blown conversation with the person. So I have to go off hunting and googling to find an address where we can have that. Whether it's Email, Skype, IM, IRC Nick or whatever. Frequently I just give up because the profile pages on each system are so thin, or because the person is hiding their communication addresses.


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[ 06-Jul-07 8:08am ] [ , ]