One of the things I always do after an event is go through the people I met and see if I can connect to them, e.g. on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook. This time around, part of that is adding people to my RSS reader, because they blog. This is an additional pleasure, not just because it extends my network of bloggers that I read, but also because doing so was a key part of my conversations at Crafting {:} a Life in the past days. So I am subscribing to people with which I already have had extended time talking. This immediately puts them at a shorter social distance than normally when exploring new blogs (and they requested me to describe better the importance to me of that, and what/why/how I do that).
Rosie le Faive as a direct consequence of the conversations at Peter’s unconference started a blog press pound. Her first posting is a very good start (definitely not the ‘hello world, is this thing on?’ variety) and I hope to read much more (here’s a bunch of reminders to self that I keep handy when falsely thinking I need to write ‘properly’ before I can press pound to publish). It’s a WordPress blog and it launched with IndieWeb support for Webmention, which is very good. There’s a whole bunch of IndieWeb peeps hanging out on IRC/Slack, Rosie.
Clark McCleod’s Kelake blog in contrast has been around since 2001/2. This too is a WP blog, so I hope to see Clark add Webmention and other IndieWeb features.
Steven Garrity’s blog Acts of Volition goes back to 2000. I’ve been aware of him for a long time, ever since he figured in Peter’s surprise at how well known PEI turned out to be when he first visited Reboot in Copenhagen. Now I’ve met him in person and added him to my reader.
At last week’s Crafting {:} a Life unconference on PEI I participated in three conversations on blogging:
What happened to blogging? Initiated by Steven Garrity
The future of blogging. Initiated by Peter Rukavina
Doing Blogging. Initiated by me
Elmine already blogged some of her impressions from these conversations. I’ll add some of my own.
What happened to blogging?
It started with Steven Garrity who asked “What happened to blogging?” in the morning of the first day. Some 20 people wanted to take part in that so we put together a big circle in the main hall. The group had long time bloggers (over 20 years), those whose blogs fell more or less silent, and those who never blogged but are interested in doing so. What followed was a discussion of why we started blogging, and what happened to those initial conditions. I started to think out loud, but kept going because of the wide peer network that emerged because of our distributed conversations across blogs. We suspected started blogging right in the perfect moment: the number of people blogging in your fields of interest was big enough to feel engaged, and small enough to feel like a town you can keep an overview of. We first welcomed the silos like Facebook and Twitter as it made interacting even easier and brought in more people as the required level of tech savvy dropped. What however at first seemed like a source of agency turned into the erosion of it. Long form writing evaporated, more exchanges turned into ’empty calories’. RSS as an easy way of following what was going on eroded the too. Many sites ‘forgot’ what RSS was, and that accelerated when the most visible reader by Google fell by the wayside. Although we also felt that blaming Google Reader solely isn’t right, it was a development that fit in a larger change already underway.
We also discussed how some of that original blog interaction in the early ’00s has been channeled into other modes of communications, like newsletters. Peter Bihr for instance mentioned how it felt like newsletters are a more direct form of communication, with a clear audience in mind, and responses to it are of much higher quality. We missed the kick of the interaction between blogs, as well as having the time and attention to reflect and write more deeply.
Part of the blogging circle
The future of blogging
Having looked back in the morning, some of us felt we wanted to not just be melancholic but also look at what a constructive future of blogging looks like. So Peter suggested to do another conversation in the afternoon. Part of the reason for this was in our immediate circle we saw several people who ‘returned’ to blogging, like myself. Part of it is the appearance of new web standards, the IndieWeb that intends to take the useful traits of social media platforms and apply them to your own websites. Opting to enjoy the weather we had this conversation in Peter’s back yard. We talked about a variety of things connected to blogging. The technology that can assist in getting more interaction between blogs, in helping to make publishing easy. And the behaviours that help to blog more, doing away with expectations of what ‘proper’ blogging is and giving oneself permission to just do what you want.
The future of blogging taking shape in Peter’s back yard
Doing blogging
The second day of the unconference was positioned as a ‘doing’ day. As the ‘future of blogging’ conversation surfaced a lot of ‘how-to’ questions, I suggested we could do a more practice oriented session. On what is currently technically possible, and how that looks in practice for instance in my blog. The weather was great again, so we opted for the back yard like the day before. Bright sunlight and a scarcity of laptops meant we didn’t ‘do’ much. We did talk about the practical steps one can take, and the purpose and working of the various IndieWeb standards. This developed in a wider ranging conversation on our various information routines and the tools we use. Participants were eagerly taking notes to learn from each other’s tool use. From tools and routines we went to life hacks, and a much wider scope of topics. That was a great experience, although it meant that the original topic of conversation moved out of sight. I felt in flow in this conversation, and it went on literally for hours without effort and without energy levels dropping away.
The ‘doing blogging’ circle of participants
Direct consequence is that one of the participants launched her own blog, with IndieWeb support from the start. Another that questions about how I read along lines of ‘social distance’ led to me explaining that in detail today. Important to me is that I also could add a number of bloggers to my ‘global village’ of people whose postings I read, adding more voices to the mix I take in. I also plan to write a number of postings starting from the issues raised in the conversations to introduce and explain the IndieWeb standards. The current documentation mostly starts with tech, and that means a too high threshold for adoption for large groups.