Blogging is here to stay, but there is an ongoing healthy transition from fashionable to a tool for people who have something to say.

Microblogging is worse, because people can’t stay on topic on twitter. It mixes information you want, like business insight from someone in IT, with things you didn’t want to know about the person, like “my son just gave me a foot massage”. Bad signal to noise ratio.

From what I understand, lots of sciences rely on “recycling” and combinining other peoples work to create something “new” on top of all that. It’s some kind of dialogue — which is not necessary in a heavily-connected environment like the web. What do you all want the web to be? It’s not books, after all.

Knowledge can be accumulated in good ol’ libraries. You could also rely on some information available online as well, talking Wikipedia or http://plato.stanford.edu/. If you write something genuine, then it’s some kind of article, it’s real content. When someone else blogs about your text, adding her opinion to a hyperlink only, she may as well post a comment to the article itself. When she wants to control the comment’s availability (extending a website’s possible discontinuation), she puts the comment on her blog and hopes to get a PingBack/TrackBack. I think that’s the purpose of these “services”.

I don’t want to differentiate between blog posts and articles. For me, both should have a lot in common. In fact, iA does a great job publishing what I’d call articles. This isn’t a “traditional” blog, this is not about opinion only and thank God it’s not about “ReBlogging”. This very article here is an invitation for us to participate in a discussion, I think.

And I think you do well by “forcing” people to identify themselves, Oliver. Look at Facebook/MySpace/…: people publish lots of personal details. When they want to add valuable content to a discussion, they will identify themselves for they do not fear to have personal details available online anymore.

We should push development a step further: control and own everything you put online with your personal website (beyond just OpenID authentication). My comment should be stored and appear on my website automatically, showing where I leave traces whenever I want to. This way I (hopefully :)) add value to your website by commenting on your articles i.e. participating in the public discussion while I add content to my own website as well. For narcisstic reasons, I’m sure, but that doesn’t matter a lot to me anyway. I’m okay with that :)

I imagine a protocol/service/API on which all that relies. I click “submit comment”, identify on my website which will receive the text body and a URL afterwards for permanent storage. When it’s done, iA might request a few personal details (like my name) which I grant access to and store an instance of my comment here, connecting it to this article.

Then someone else comes around and disagrees with me. This is a reply to both my comment and the article on iA. Her comment will be made available to iA the same way mine was only this time my website will be notified of a reply as well. Pingbacks/Trackbacks kind of do this already to connect blog posts.

Lots of people will probably not see any advantage in this kind of connection, but I think we narcisstic tech-savvy web worker will benefit. I imagine everything online being open in the above mentioned way: everything will be an item you can aggregate to your personal web profile. This is just beyond Facebook and MySpace. I think it’s the inevitable result of current technology (think OpenID, OpenSocial, XFN, …) and the heavily-connected blogosphere.

Hopefully I didn’t get too much off-topic, all this kind of evolved while I was writing. I hope you don’t mind for your initial post was something really personal and I begun talking tech here :S

Perhaps, we have the need to express (in this case, writing) because in expressing, we manifest our “Dasein”. And as a human, is it not natural to propagate and promulgate one’s self, that we may be remembered, that we may be eternal? Of course that is silly. However, it is human nature to seek the infinite, even if he is doomed to fail.

As we move towards the age of ‘self’ more and more, a customised solution is becoming more and more the future.

How can you write customised book for a group of … 2-3 people? Which IA (I am an IA by the way) is going to really take your points on board? How many points are actually worthy of taking on board considering how different projects are?

I feel your pain.

One of the most important, and generally underlooked, aspects of Baroque is the conspicuous expenditure of wealth and power to produce art. Without enormous wealth and exploitable labor put to work on behalf of that wealth, IMHO it’s hard to call the form Baroque. While Baroque is marked by excessive quantity of ornament, Baroque doesn’t equal excess unless it is an excess of beauty.