blogs

[Triple Zero]

dunno if this is the place person to spew this idea on, but nobody else is online that's got a proper brain to bounce it off to.

reading the bit about auto-generated weblogs in the Hillary/GTA4/Prostitute discussion with Nigel, apart from thinking, "auto generated blog, i still gotta build that some day" (but, another day), it made me start thinking, what actually *is* a weblog?

in the old days of the web, you didn't have weblogs, but some techies just hacked together some sort of CMS (content management system) for a website that allowed people to change the contents of a website in a slightly easier way than uploading separate HTML files to a server via FTP every time.

these CMSes, in the widest interpretation, take on a variety of forms, varying from complicated to very simple:

- the old POEE.co.uk phpnuke website (complicated)
- a webforum like this (complicated)
- a weblog with posts, comments and a feed (medium)
- a custom assigned website with some news items, basic article editing functionality (medium-easy, this is what i do for freelance work)
- a guestbook (easy)

now, a techie used to just build the website they needed, free-form, not thinking "this will be a blog" or anything.

but one day, there were blogs. and there appeared software for every n00b to build one.

what did the popularity come from?

- in the initial phase, probably simplism and lack of deep nested hierarchy. the old "hypertext" view of the web, with directories and pages linking into eachother, with old dusty pages nobody really maintains anymore, really needs some good overview to keep it sane, and in the end will always become a tangled mess. first two random examples that come to mind for pages like that are http://searchlores.org and Laz's "Closer to God" website.
but a weblog is automatically structured. it's just a historical timeline of blogposts, that can be archived into months, years, etc. you don't need to maintain old stuff because everybody can see it's two years old.

- then of course came the social aspect, people can comment on the blog-items. even though this added one extra layer of hierarchy, the authors are separate, so that was still simple.

- then came the blogosphere in which everybody everywhere trackbacks, pingbacks, autocopies items for spamblogs, people subscribe to feeds, blogrolls, and more.

but i was thinking, a weblog is kind of on the medium-scale of complexity for websites. not too simple, not too complicated either.
and it's just one of a huge variety of formats a website can be ordered in.

i want to hear you guys ideas on different formats that are not present in the current ecosystem of the web yet, but are simple (preferably simpler than blogs), yet viral (like blogs).

an example of a new thing is http://twitter.com , it's simpler than a blog, people can just sign up and broadcast very short messages (160 chars, like an sms). it's got a social network attached so friends just receive the messages of what everybody in their network is doing, and everybody just broadcasts .. sounds horribly shallow, but if the thing was blindingly fast instead of running on a squeaky slow Ruby server, it'd be taking the social web by storm now.

ideas? brainstorm?

[Cain]

Blog forums are going to increase, I am certain of it.  By that I mean formats like Comment is Free (my favourite place to go when I need to TYPE IN ALL CAPS at someone) where blog posts are collected in a central area for commenting on.  It also in this case acts as a nexus point between the media and online bloggers because it is hosted on the Guardian site.  Its a logical mix of commenting on stories and the ever-increasing popularity of blogs.

I've actually read an interesting theory on a few blog sites about the evolution of online communities.  Lets call it, for the sake of simplicity, the troll-forced evolution theory.  For those wanting to discuss SRS TOPICS in the early days, Usenet was the place to go.  But after the Eternal September and Meow Wars, all the SRS TOPICS went to forums.  When it became apparent that forums were even easier to troll, it moved onto the blogosphere, where individual member control over the blog allowed trolling to be stamped out, of the user wants to.  There is also notably less trolling than normal on CiF (Polly Toynbee articles aside) because most of the people there do have blogs they have invested heavily in, in terms of time.  Bringing internet wrath down on themselves is not their plan (controversy is another matter entirely) and is done at a higher cost than it would be on a board or even individual blog.

That's the upward evolutionary trend, that I see, of centralized interaction.  I suspect there will also be a downward evolutionary trend too, like Twitter, hollowing out intermediary levels.  Facebook's own friend based feed system is likely to be streamlined by other services as well, though god knows how given how much information Facebook itself currently allows you to have.  I suspect the next logical step would be personalized archives of your friend's changes to their profile or status.

Another system may be  creating a platform whereby updates to a blog, profile on social networking sites, shopping sites etc are all collected onto a single personalized feed.  Again, some people have already tried to do this, but the scope could be vastly extended.  Imagine if Amazon, iTunes, Facebook and Blogger updates could all be fed into a single profile (verifying those accounts are yours, naturally), and other sites can be added to the list via an open source application, allowing music,films, software etc to spread entirely virally.  A standardization of websites for commercial and networking purposes will take place for the mutual benefit of both in terms of marketing products and advertising revenue, I suspect so this would make sense.

Of course, I don't know how "simple" any of these would really be.

[bringdownthesystem]

Well personally I think blogs WERE a good idea, but with this simplicity and a "anyone anywhere" can do it type attitude...I hate it. My blogs just would get lost unless I feel like promoting it right(spamming lol).

I think sites like  Myspace has it covered anyways, they now have blogs for...blogging.
They have a update quick thing like that twitter to say what your doing RIGHT THEN and update everyone to that. Then they have bulletins to post whatever to your friends like messages broadcast to everyone...they don't have to read. And THEEEN they took away email with their messaging and comments system. They took over like a bitch.

I think next, we MIGHT see an uprising of places like  http://www.snapvine.com/  ...
With things like that, I can post my rants up like:
BAM! RANT! http://www.snapvine.com/bp/SRigWtTrEdyUQQAwSFxyrg