Dave Winer is Bringing Back Blogging
As Om Malik says, Dave Winer has again sounded a couple of his prophetic warnings. Both of which seem to point back to the importance of the evolution of blogging.
The common thread to these warnings: the danger of a single company being the sole provider of Web plumbing, infrastructure, or coral reefs.
Twitter and URL shortening services have been the most recent warnings and both have show their frailty in the last couple of weeks. Naturally this is triggering a rethinking of how this plumbing is provided, maintained, and serviced in the Web ecosystem: Anil Dash’s Pushbutton Web, Google’s PubSubHubBub, RSSCloud.
The even more interesting trend is that it is bringing people back to their blogs–little corners of the Web they own. Maybe in all the fever of compressed attention spans we had forgotten that humans still need/want context. This is Om’s point that struck me–maybe we just misapplied many of these services function:
Late last year, following the Bombay terrorist attacks, I wrote about Twitter’s growing influence as a source of breaking news and how, in order to make sense of it all, we need more context. The best place to provide that context is now in blogs. To be sure, most people view Twitter as a microblogging service, but I’ve always seen it as micromessaging service — and the more I used it, the more I realized what a disjointed conversation it can produce.
It will be interesting as we sort it out. After all we always do. Dave Winer is leading the charge to have that sorting take place on our blogs, with #blogpostfriday.