Blogs as Personal Presence Portal Revisited

Stuart Henshall reflects on how he will move away from 'traditional' blogging in the coming year. This triggered some comments by me in his blog, but also this longish post, which is largely unorganized thoughts and assocations. Just a first step in sensemaking.

I'm seeing signs that blogs are declining in usefulness and utility as they are pushed into activities they are not suited for. [...] Going Blogging was one of the most rewarding things I've done in the last few years. It has connected me with wonderful people all over the world. It's brokered many a new introduction. Still I'm planning on giving up my blog in the new year. I'm migrating away from being just a blogger.

Stuart thinks the format is becoming too solitary for him, and he plans on being a more collaborative contributor. Oh I want to own my own words, and I hope create and nurture new pages to life. However, they shouldn't stop there. For the most part a blog is a static repository while the world is a living organism. I want to breath life into change. Thus I need to open source my approach to writing, sharing, and becoming part of a broader collective intelligence. (For more on Collective Intelligence, please read George Por's weblog)

A lot of what Stuart says rings true to my ears. I have seen my blogpostings become less frequent, in my mind as a result of spending a lot of time and energy in what Johnnie Moore calls the in-between spaces. In relationships, in collaboration etc. However this has been largely blog-induced. Blogs are great to think out loud and thus to trigger new conversations and relationships. That's why I think Elmine Wijnia's communicative definition of weblogs is hitting the nail on the head. Blogs are far less effective though in feeding and sustaining those relationships and collaboration it helped trigger, except as placeholders at which they are very good again. This is a point Denham Grey is repeatedly making.

Blogs aren't evolving enough
Stuart says Blogs remain static in structure, they haven't evolved much. I think I recognize what he means. Blogs not only give individuals a voice, but by the sheer number of them can also put people at a distance. Stuart notes I think that the large number of blogfeeds together form a filter, my community filter, of what is going on and what is thought to be important. Then not the individual posting as such draws my attention but the aggregate patterns I see in the info-soup. (See also Every Signal Starts out as Noise) The fact that individual bloggers to me are not only worthwile as conversational partners themselves, but also parts in the Early Warning System their collective rss-feeds form, is not something that is reflected in our blogs. Blogs haven't adapted to their new additional role as aggregating piece of a wider filter/pattern.

Personal Presence Portal, revisited: Two directions in which to evolve
This brings us back I think to an earlier conversation on blogs as Personal Presence Portals. We have started our blogs as soapboxes, triggering conversations, which turned into relations and collaboration. At the same time your blogs created new horizons for me, making me aware of much more events, information and stuff than before. Putting all that together created a new filter to view the world with (and made magazine and paper subscriptions superfluous for me). If our blogs need to evolve than this should be in two directions I think. The first direction to serve us better on an individual level, the second to serve us better as part of the aggregate filter, as pixel in the pattern.

Evolving into full-blown on-line personae
One direction is to enhance value on a personal level, creating loads of more context. Not by only being an outlet channel for thoughts, but the on-line hub of my life. This could mean (more) integration with my other personal information tools (think private and public wiki, yasns), providing not only personal intellectual context (books I read etc.), but especially more social context. I feel my blogroll does not serve my purpose as an indicator of my network well. So being able to share information about my networks (localized yasn? Feeds from LinkedIn, OpenBC?) would be an option. But once I share that, I want to be able to determine who sees what on my blog. My network consists of circles, with different shades of intimacy and trust. I want the access someone has to my blog to reflect that, much like real online portals are able to do (or forums with their reputation systems for instance). If I work with you, our work should be accessible through my blog/wiki. Others should only be able to see what we want to share about it (nothing, the fact that we collaborate, some of the results, some of the work, everything). Also access to multiple communication channels falls into this category. Or I could think of things like a section "people I have been in touch with today", showing us more of the in-between spaces.

My blog evolving into an effective part of your filter (and yours for mine)
Another route for evolution, to satisfy the role as filtering part of the whole, would be turning to microcontent a la Marc Canter more (who by the way talks of digital life style aggregators in the same way I think of presence portals). If I am part of your community filter, I should think about how to feed that filter better and more effectively. Only part of what I filter myself becomes visible in my blog. As I write this, dozens of links/articles/pages come to mind, which I won't all mention, but are nevertheless important. You could benefit if I had a channel where I did open them up for you. Martin Roell's Newsfeed sort of serves that purpose I think. De.licio.us, my bookmarks feed (rss), does as well. How about if I opened up those feeds right in my blog, adding the wiki-changes, feeds of comments I made elsewhere, etc. Or all the feeds I read myself. There is no need here for me to organize all those different info-particles or make some sense of them, just a need to show you which info-particles I encounter and pick up. It's about leaving trails really, as Steven Johnson writes in his book Emergence.

So how feed the filter more? By supplying additional feeds, but also perhaps by supplying additional blogs/content streams. I write about Knowledge Management, but also (fledgingly) about alternate energy sources. A more traditional life-log could add perspective (especially if geo-tagged). Where have I been, what did I do, and not restrict it to the topic at hand (knowledge management in this case). It is through this type of info that things go click, in my mind at least, which helps me connect the dots. Stuart said his blog would have been more succesfull if it had had more focus. Even though I don't know what success in this case means, I am suggesting that for my blog to be a usefull part of your community filter it would need less focus. Or at least, different foci in different sections of my blog as personal presence portal. Important here would be to open up this stuff to you in a non-time consuming way. I don't want to write down the trails to feed into your filter, they need to be able to write themselves down.

Where to start?
The first thing that comes to mind is evaluating my current blog. What info is on there, and what role does it serve. Uncluttering the blog, and then recluttering it purposefully, you might say. A second step would be moving more traces into view, and add pointers to other foci. Change feeds for the wiki (or different wiki's I am active in) and that sort of stuff.

What suggestions do you have?