Blogging is stupid

There are better things than "blaaahgs" to carry your work into the world wide web and create exposure for your ideas. A purpose of blogging that blogs have failed to satisfy is the process of integrating and weaving together the patchwork of human knowledge and experience. Well there have been many inventions besides blogs, some that existed and worked well before blogs, that provide ways of assembling that tapestry and making it browsable, discoverable and useful.

Most of these are inherently communal, and are when you need to give up your control (and your copyright) over your content. Others (such as the site you're reading now), are meant to retain a sense of proprietorship without simultaneously contaminating it with bloggish narcissism. You wouldn't be mistaken if, after reading this, you conclude that "hey, this guy thinks Wikis are The Shit,' but that's mainly because Wikis are--like "blogs"--embodiments of a particular infectious idea, and I happen to think the Wiki idea is more powerful than the Blog idea. So, with that, lets start with Wikis, and why you'd rather use them.

When you want to Just Write Something

When you have a quick nugget of information to share, try creating an article in Wikipedia. Now sometimes what you want to write about doesn't fit Wikipedia's content guidelines, and so you may, instead, get acquainted with other Wikis with different focuses and guidelines that allow public submissions. For the greatest impact, you should look for the largest, most popular pre-existing Wiki that fits your topic, get an account if you have to, and start pouring your mind into it.

You might ask why you'd want to do it this way, and the shallow answer is that you'll be hijacking another site's traffic to expose your ideas to. A deeper answer is that by seeking a "marketplace" of ideas and inserting yours into it, you're contributing to a greater body of knowledge. All that airy, philosophical talk means, really, is that a single and consistent source of knowledge is better than a balkanized, half "long-tail", half "A-listed" conglomeration of knowledge. Or, to put in another way:

The hyperlink is it.

Blogs see hyperlinks as seeds to crystalize around, but hyperlinks are the substance crystals are made of. In HTML-speak, a link is also called an "anchor", and when you go looking for a Wiki or other collaborative site and stick your thoughts into it, stitching them to the categories and topics that already exist on the site, you've made an anchor that other people can use, like it was a word in a new language everybody is inventing on the fly.

When everything is in once place, the language has a chance to be intelligible. Blogs treat hyperlinks as launching points, while a Wiki treats them almost literally as atoms. Wikis are so zealous for hyperlinks they automatically assume any word with a capital letter halfway through it is a link to something interesting, and begs the author to make the destination exist if it doesn't already. While blogs afford the update, Wikis afford the expansion.

When you feel the need to correct something

If the false material is on a Wiki, then all the better: just go ahead and edit it. if it's not on a Wiki, consider actually "porting" the content to one and making your correction there. Porting doesn't mean copying it, unless the material is public domain, but if, for example, you read a web page that makes a false claim about aerodynamics, then you can "correct" it, so to speak, by writing a competing article.

When you want to Link

Instead of hiding your discoveries in your unread blog, try submitting interesting URLs to community linking sites such as Digg and Reddit. These kinds of sites are pioneering something that many people impulsively call "blogs" (just like they compulsively label any non-corporate/non-shopping-cart web site a blog, whether it resembles one or not), but are actually something else. All bodies of content, even one as huge as The Internet, needs a "tickler", or something that churns new or topically relevant material to the top. I'd love to keep using the butter-churn metaphor for these, since that's kind of the way I think of their purpose. Another way of looking at community linking sites is as a supply of oxygen bubbles filtering through a fish tank, keeping everything in it alive and healthy.

When you want to discuss

Blogs have unfortunately made a mess of the art of discussion and debate, especially when the Internet has had excellent tools for years before blogs. Usenet and web discussion forums give you several advantages that blogs can't even hope to, the foremost of which is threading. The next powerful advantage is the ability to read many related discussions in one place and with one interface. And finally, threads can go on as long as they have to, without falling out of the scope of attention simply because the blog posting with the "Comments" has now rotated off the front page.

When you want to create

When you have in mind a lengthy essay or story or something of greater depth than can easily be accommodated by a Wiki, and especially if you want to retain ultimate control over it, consider using services such as Infogami to create mini-sites. "One-pagers" will work here, but think of what happens after you've made your creation and you've now had its ideas rumbling in your brain for a few weeks or months: as you come up with new thoughts, examples and supplementary material, you can expand the mini-site into a multi-page affair. Let it grow like a garden, producing new fruits, flowers and landscape features over time. This way you get something that inherently belongs to you, but can stay focused on a single issue without it getting buried in a drizzle of blog-mush or poisoned by the kind of self-centered naval-gazing that blogging affords.

last updated 3 years ago #