Why Iam Nota Blogger

I've been pondering this oddity. You see, I was a usenet junkie way back in the eighties. When usenet sank under its own weight in the nineties, there were still mailing lists and a few surviving corners of usenet like the aus.* hierarchy. And since then, Wiki and its kind.

I read the odd blog on occasion but nothing regular. I read a few aggregators very occasionally. More regularly, a couple MSM aggregators, since I don't watch TV or read straight MSM. If I'm googling, I don't avoid blogs per se, but don't seek same and never linger.

More importantly, I don't have a blog, have no urge to write a blog, and almost never leave comments on a blog. Yet I have started a couple wikis and, despite protestations to the contrary, I don't spend more than a few months at a stretch away from WardsWiki.

Why?

I think it comes down to the WikiNature. I fundamentally like the idea that if I write something valuable, people will grow it - extend it, maintain it, squabble over it, and supersede it when it gets old. And that if I write something crappy, it'll just get zapped and that's that. WikiIsNotYourBlog, and neither is it mine. But it's generative, whereas blogging is declarative. Blogs are like bumperstickers, whereas wikis are like improv. In blogistan everyone is an author, but in WikiDom everyone is an editor.

I think that's it. I like to edit and be edited, not to write and be syndicated. But I'm not certain I've got to the nub of it. If you HaveThisPattern, maybe you could edit this page and make it clearer? -- PeterMerel

I moved the nice summary to WikiBlogComparison.

Anthropy! I think a lot of meaningful stuff is being written into blogs, which is then hard to search, esp the way blog-sites serve pages, which means a GoogleSearch will bring me somehow to the wrong page, and I end up reading it from the GoogleCache.

The WikiWay makes us sort things in some KindOf? meaningful order though sometimes just weird and fun. ;)

Also,

Blogging, like UseNet before it, is PissingInTheWind?. It's closed source - no one is free to edit it. On Wiki, your content is maintained OpenSource - and it can long outlive you. WikiIsImmortal?. Well, so long as Ward's around to keep it up ... hmm, that's rather a nasty TruckFactor, dontcha think?

Not only is it closed source, but it's single source. Who are you that I should want to read or care about your opinions? But on wiki you get multiple opinions and on the same page too. Almost like looking at the opinion page in the newpaper. One of the reasons I can't stand looking at discussion threads on other sites is that you need to load a new page for every person's post.

OTOH, I sometimes need to get up on a soapbox, and I don't want some bozo editing my well-crafted opinion piece. And we all know that it's quite possible for a wiki to get an infestation of argumentative types that cannot let someone just talk.

In that case, a blog or other web site you can publish pages to (mostly read-only to the rest of the world) would probably serve you well. A Wiki serves me well. When I find important information worth remembering, I like to put it on a Wiki. Others can then improve it; add, extend, correct, etc. A Wiki serves me well; I haven't yet (early '2006) found a good reason for me to blog. -- JeffGrigg (who later joined the lemmings at http://jeffgrigg.wordpress.com/category/blogging/ ;-)

And then there's this: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2006/01/09/building-a-forum-with-bribes/ ...

Words fail me. BlogistanIsDead. Long live wiki and all who sail in her!

Pardon me, but the death of Usenet is wildly exaggerated, as are the virtues of wiki. I just stumbled upon this page while checking RecentPages for the first time in a long while, and I think this is symptomatic for this wiki and wikis in general. You go away for a while, and the questions "what happened?" and "what's today's topic?" are virtually unaskable. Not so with NNTP news.

During most of February, and a large part of March, I participated in several discussions on the topic of some Danish newspaper cartoons depicting (more or less) the prophet Muhammad. These discussion were spread over multiple blogs, and a few websites' forums, and within these over a couple of main topics. What a *nuisance* to keep track of all this.

As for wiki, when I first joined this wiki some years ago, I posted my reservations about wiki on WikiSuccessCanInhibitNewWriters. Of course I no longer remember *when* I posted those reservations. And that is one major point. I don't seem able to find out. [It was April 9, 2003, since that was when LasseHiller was last edited.] There is a conventional distinction in Wiki between DocumentMode and ThreadMode, and I believe that while DocumentMode is the bread and butter of Wiki (though it isn't without problems of its own), ThreadMode is just a terrible awful kludge. It doesn't even deserve to be called hack. Usenet has a long history of fine-tuning of discussions, a history as long as the history of the Internet itself (or longer?). A history which is strongly intertwined with the history of mailing lists, another means of conducting discussion which is far from being obsolete, although Wiki, blog and webboard enthusiasts will want to tell you otherwise. I think it is fine to explore a new tool, such as wiki - or Usenet for that matter - to discover its strengths and weaknesses. Usenet had some failures: as a means to distribute large files it is both a success and a failure. Usenet binaries are undoubtably popular among some people. But stuff like comp.unix.sources has long been replaced by various websites in the Open Source community, and no-one will publish a new piece of software there. But a wiki also is problematic. At work, we are trying to use it for various documentation purposes, and it works, to some extent. But precisely for such a purpose, some kind of accountability or at least attributability is desirable, and if this is not intrinsic to the tool, but a voluntary convention, it simply is too unreliable.

I have a vision in which each tool is used within its frame of applicability. Why have tens or hundreds of ways to conduct asynchronous online discussion? Such discussion is Usenet, yes, it is that simple. Synchronous discussion? I suppose that's IRC. Private, asynchronous interpersonal discussion? Take it to Mail, then. Producing a document of consensus? Use Wiki. Ask for highly structured input of some sort? Use a web-based form. Publish documents? Use WWW. Search the information space? Use a search engine - or perhaps even good old WAIS. Et cetera, et cetera. This is completely orthogonal to what kind of interface you may prefer. Most people will happily use a web-based interface, GMail, Hotmail, Google, Google groups, or whatever. Some people will want to use a specialized agent for some purposes.

What is required is to remember again that the Internet is more than HTTP. I find it outrageously comic that the RPC protocol has been reinvented within the last few years as SOAP and WebServices. Old wine in new bottles. We should rediscover the old protocols, and the good, and proven, ways of interaction that are associated with them.

I believe there is a pulse or wave in technology. A wave that oscillates between total fragmentation and total convergence. That is all fine. I think the time is now overripe to do both some fragmenting and some converging. For example, Usenet needs an update. What if there was a DNS-oriented hierarchy in addition to the established hierarchies? In some sense, there already is, as there are many "private" news hierarchies that get wide propagation. But what if every domain implicitly had its own Usenet branch? A branch that only required a seed newsserver, which could be a simple gateway between a mailing list or a web board (such as phpBB) available on port 119. So if you wanted to participate in the discussion on that site, instead of registering locally, you subscribe to the NNTP service, perhaps through a proxy (which could even be the news server of your ISP.) Of course, this would require an even more dynamic way of creating and terminating newsgroups. The newsgroup could have attached moderation of any sort, from nothing at all, over automatic enforcement of certain rules, to the traditional omnipotent human moderator.

We are at a wavetop, where almost everything has converged to HTTP/WWW. We now need to fragment again, renovate and revive some of the old stuff, and reinstate it within the technological framework we have today. If we don't do this, we are doomed to reinvent all that stuff, and frankly I don't believe we will do a better job of it. At least not in the case of public discussion. Usenet was and is unsurpassed in that area. The people who made it and contributed to its evolution over so many years did a terrific job, and I would hate to see their efforts wasted in the name of "everything over port 80".

I could go on and on about this, but before I commit myself, I wonder: Am I making any sense, is anybody interested, or am I just a nostalgic guy who has failed to get with the times?

Now, if this were Usenet, I would watch for follow-ups to this rant, but this being wiki, I'll have to bookmark this page, and return now and then, to see if anybody has edited in some comments. That's another thing I hate. Such a process doesn't lend itself to automation. With news, I could use some kind of kiboscript on my newsspool. (And who knows, maybe some dissatisfied soul edits out this rant altogether. Wiki is much to volatile for my tastes.)

"Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it." - Santayana

INTELLECTUAL PROFANITY: This is what I like to call the above text when a distinct short answer is replaced with an epic novel. Information/newsgroup/forum/wiki site bit rates,port speeds it doesnt matter the key essential is that we advance as a population of this PLANET and thus hooray for wiki and what it affords us as a race. "Those who only believe in the past have already been left behind" Paul Hunter -- LasseHp

So - tried GoogleWave yet? :) -- TarynEast?

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