The future of blogs - the sources of our infosphere

Over the last few weeks I’ve had a few of those moments that combine to form a much larger moment where things start to make sense.

In more or less chronological order this is how it goes:

1. Talking to Adrian on the plane to Blogtalk - I argue that the most significant aspect of blogs is the kodakisation of publishing he says that it isn’t, it’s the fact that pretty much anyone can now have an enormous multi layered website.

2. On the blogwalk there was quite a discussion about archiving, linking in nicely with an iterative conversation I’d had with Simon about the impending passing of ‘more digital storage than we can ever need’ moment

3. Yesterday I spent a wonderful morning discussing blogs as eportfolios with Marg among others. The idea of each student having one central blog from their uni and then hanging on to it for life is not so far off.

4. This morning I pick up a pingback from Bud who argues for not: “static archives created by some central authority” but rather “living archives created by the community.”

5. And straight after that I have a talk with Simon again about how a (deliberately) unnamed Digital Object Management System he’s been working with has just run aground in a $2.5m bad way. And in that conversation I think I realised something pretty important, namely:

Blogs, as we use them, are not going to take over the world (there are a limited number of pubic writers out there) BUT blogs as electronic identity, content and communication management systems are.

The problem we have in universities, organisations and communities is that we’ve taken a centralised view of storage, i.e. here’s a bucket, drop stuff into it and the bucket will manage it. We’ve been searching for tools to manage our identity, knowledge, learning objects, community information and more for a long long time based on this central bucket premise… and we keep on failing, dismally.

What the next generation of blog and aggregation tools will provide (WordPress and Drupal heading the pack right now) is something that changes all of that. Yes, there will always be the chronological posting tools and yes there will always be posting and conversation like this but we’re starting to be able to create infinitely flexible separate bits of content, with no problems whatsoever and open source RSS aggregators are starting to come through that have such flexibility and storage capacity that envisaging each employee / student having a blog and that organisation automatically aggregating all of that content into storage is starting to become a very near everyday possibility.

Put simply this means that we don’t need the bucket to be anything more than a bucket any more which we can build tools to semantically dip into.

The creation of this data and it’s initial management is entirely centred on the individual or group which produces it. Not only does this mean that you can junk your horrible centralised system in favour of a myriad of tools (which also incorporate subversion at will) but you can also relax about your xml data production and control, just have everyone spitting out RSS feeds.

Add to that the fact that through this system you are also enabling feedback mechanisms, control and ownership of individual identity online and self-selective zeitgeist-esque audience. And you’ve got genuine centred communication as well.

It’s a funny feeling but the future of blogs may have very little to do with the use of blogs as we know them now. The future of blogs may well be as the core, centred elements that make up our infospheres, the fact that they are tools for interaction, private reflection, identity an collaboration purely incidental to the integral part they will play in our everyday online existence.