Thursday, November 05, 2009

The Evolving Blog

Andrew Sullivan nails it.
It's a clearing house for views and ideas and videos and art and argument and anecdote and reporting that create a community of discourse. It's as much your blog now as mine. The posts from readers are just as informative and often more enlightening than my own. Yes, I'm still writing or editing or approving almost every post, but the flow of conversation increasingly leads me, rather than my directing it. As I've noted before, I'm more of a DJ now than a traditional writer. The Dish is always sampling, re-mixing and generating its own music in the interaction with others.
This evolution is why I think, although they are no longer the kingpins of social meda, blogs will never go away.

It also reminds me that despite all my new found commitments, I need to get bloggy with it. I'm working on a couple of pieces about the mayor's race and hopefully will have them up before I flee for the country tomorrow.

3 comments:

Ed aka: The Thunder said...

If blogs are a clearinghouse for views and ideas, mightn't Andrew want to open his site for comments?

griftdrift said...

He actually covered that recently. He doesn't like the chaos of a bajillion people thrashing around and even though I am very open on commenting, I tend to understand. Visited any of the AJC blogs lately? I advocate open commenting but I have a feeling my perspective about it would change if I had the stratospheric number of readers like the Daily Dish.

And also, although he does not allow commenting, he's very free with passing along readers thoughts.

DM said...

Amen Andrew. Thanks for pointing this out Grift.

I've thought about the blogger as moderator for a while now (especially in comparison to the journalist), but DJ is another good metaphor. Throw in a little original reporting, and you've got yourself a local news blog.

Storytelling is only one way of communicating info. The other is the conversation, recently released onto the old, marketed storytelling model with impunity. But like the "real world", there is a happy medium between these two forms of communication. How can I be so sure? Because these have been the established methods of communication amongst human beings for eons. It's just the conversation could never be marketed to advertisers before. Only now is that possible.