Chances are, if you are reading this you’ve heard a great deal about the transformative power of blogs. If not, here are a few examples I’ve run across. Tuesday, on NPR’s Diane Rehm show, Dan Burstein (co-author of Blog!: How the World of Blogs And Bloggers Is Changing Our Culture) referred to them as a “second superpower.” Political blogs are at least partly to thank for the “Rather Gate” super-script incident, the “Swift-Boating” of John Kerry, the shaming of Trent Lott for his comments at Strom Thurmond’s funeral, and a host of other blog->main-stream media crossover scandals. Author’s blogs provide unique ways of publishing works, including one linked to on this site (which I’ve yet to read) in the comments, Rad Decision. Others have compiled much more complete lists, including, I’m sure Mr. Burstein, so I shall move on.
Convinced that blogs are yesterday’s “the next big thing” (meaning of course they’re already big, just check the count over at Technorati.com) I am keeping an eye out for how they affect our society in one particular arena with this question: “can good ideas disseminate themselves and come to the forefront more quickly?” Since I have started reading blogs in a semi-dedicated fashion over the last-few months, I have been surprised by how many good opinions I’ve run across. But, unlike more traditional discussion boards such as Slashdot, ideas, once suggested, are rarely debated to their conclusion. Thus, few ideas are truly vetted before others join the party. There is no central authority on suggestions, no Wiki to collect and allow for the voicing of a general opinion on the overwhelming multitude of voices (including my own) out there today.
I’ll be getting into this topic a bit more once I read more about it, but one thing I’ve noticed is that, thanks to tools like Technorati, the Wiki, so to speak, is in the discussion. Because not everyone will encounter an idea if it is stored in the archives of a blog, good ideas are well served by repetition. New readers come online each day by the thousands, largely ignorant of the discussion on the topic already. So they, like me, start a blog, start writing, and (most-certainly) re-tread ground covered elsewhere before. Because of the way things are structured right now, this is a good thing. Technorati and Google searches (or watch-lists) on certain topics will yield a cross-section of ideas that represent the Zeitgeist but may not be themselves new. It then falls on the individual blogger to find those with similar ideas, comment, compliment, discuss, and then link to their previously-published entries.
So, to summarize, blog entries are published media, yes, but they expire very quickly. Without a central source to gather ideas together, readers are referred by blog searches that overwhelmingly favor recent entries. So, to keep ideas fresh we need to keep repeating them, and adding to them with fresh viewpoints. Once this medium matures a little bit, we will all gather a bit of collective memory and the discussions will become more in depth, more nuanced. Perhaps we’ll figure out ways to properly attribute ideas and information, but in the meantime blogs will be less a publication and more a means of writing in the sky. By doing so, we’ve put our ideas before a larger audience than our spouses or families, but the constant and ever-shifting winds will carry those ideas away almost as soon as they are written.
Update: I forgot to mention that Nature is starting to look at blogs and their influence on scientific/academic sharing of ideas. Case in point: RealClimate.org (see my blogroll), It’s a climate science blog maintained by actual climate scientists, a first that I’ve encountered in any discipline.
