Blog years are not the same as dog years

A week or so ago Justin and both I blogged about some categorization features which we felt were missing from our current blog community. Today Justin posted another larger article which drills in a bit further on the feature-set which is provided by our current free community and others have been discussing features too. Heck, Weblogs.asp.net has even had a paragraph on its home page touting new features which are as yet un-named. All of this got me thinking and I thought that I'd pump my thoughts out while they are fresh in my mind...

A brief history of the web

Remember back when the Internet boom was in full tilt? Around that time I often heard it suggested that the age of software related items could be accurately measured by multiplying its Earthly time by a factor of 4. That is, if a website launched 12 months ago then, in Internet time they were 4 years old. This had a lot to do with the fact that the web was a trend which was in its infancy and users were constantly finding new ways to interract with it.

Back in the early days of the web, features were thin. For example I couldn't:

• Bank online
• view maps of intended holiday destinations
• write e-mail in rich text format via my web interface
• work in real time with rich client apps such as Word and Powerpoint

... and there was also less advertising :-)

More details about the previous cycle - Html, Xml, MarkUp

Through Html we learnt that we could easily describe data; we could describe senseless data to the point where we could make it colored, emboldened, animated, displayed in the title bar of a window or displayed in the status bar of a window. Being tool building creatures we quickly built tools to consume these documents, read their meta data, and consume their content so that they could be consumed in an eaier, more user-friendly manner. As we discovered more about the possibilities that lay in mark-up we quickly added features to the toolset (such as History, Favourites and increased toolset scope) to make them even more useful and useable.

Because things were happening quickly the web morphed rapildy into what we have today.

The current cycle - not waterfall, smaller iterations

Because of the limitations of the technologies surrounding the web we all tended to become much more prolific readers and writers. Writing re-emerged as the dominant way to interract with ourselves and others - it became a dominant way to express ourselves.

People were writing a lot!... articles, forums, e-mail, etc. It was good but fragmented. I was right into writing articles; I had articles on a dozen different websites that people were reading and responding to.

People could read my articles and leave comments or e-mail me their thoughts about my writing. Also, during the writing process I was generating a lot of extra thoughts.

About this time more and more people starting partitioning off sections of their sites where they could park things such as:

• temporary thoughts
• partial thoughts
• personal thoughts
• speculation
• reminders
• other, less formal rants

These areas became reserved for the term we now know as "Blogs" or "Web Logs". Recurring, personal entries into a web space. NOTE: Wiki's also became prominent at this time and serve a very similar purpose.

Just as community sites had sprung up to capture articles of a common theme, blogging communities have quickly emerged to aggregate the content of bloggers with similar interests or motives.

Because blog content is easier to publish than content on traditional sites, blogs have become a vibrant and dynamic medium for exchanging and consuming thoughts and ideas on a given topic.

In addition to the ease of entry, blogging has been afforded the luxury of evolving at a time where much more is known about exchanging dynamic data and, because of this it has been relatively simple to build tools which allow us to consume the content in a more convenient manner than we could in the previous wave.

The future

While there are features which I'd like to see immediately such as:

• Event based attributes
• Better categorization (such as global community categories)
• Better toolset for posting
• Better readers - not the people.... the tools :-)

...it's not just the tools that I focus on when I think about blogging. I think that we need to find ways to bring communites together in such a way that the lines are less clearly defined and that multiple communities can cohabit a single space. This would be in much the same way that a newpaper or television current affairs program can cover many different genres by rolling them up into a popular site. Also, the ability to search and drill-through the data must begin to emerge else we have nothing more than a fast-paced, more personalized version of the previous wave. I must admit however that it is difficult to see such a common infrastructure being developed against a medium which struggles to find ways to finance R&D.

There are certain aspects of blogging which I like. I like the fact that it helps me manage my ego and surplus of thoughts; I also like the way that they allow me to interract with people around me in a more immediate manner. I'm still left with the feeling that there's a better wave coming and that this is just a single wave within an entire set.

In a nutshell, while blogging clearly is not broken; it suffers from being feature poor and with an ill-defined set of requirements.