noirExtreme

Stuart Henshall gives us an inspiring post to start the new year.

A growing number of bloggers see the increasing awareness of the blogging phenomenon as a sign that it is time for them to move to something else if they are to remain at the forefront of IT innovation.

For the most part a blog is a static repository while the world is a living organism. I want to breath life into change. Thus I need to open source my approach to writing, sharing, and becoming part of a broader collective intelligence. You simply can't do that with blogs.
Ref: Stuart Henshall: Giving Up Traditional Blogging

Too bad, I only started reading him regularly about 2 weeks ago.

First, I disagree that blogs are static. They follow a chronological development, something that is extremely easy and convenient for readers to grasp: one thought today, another tomorrow, etc.
Now it seems that the main grief that advanced bloggers have against blogs is that they are clustered by design. Even with a lot of cross references between peers around a specific topic, blogs remain a collection of individual voices addressing an audience separately, not talking to each other and building a dialogue. This is where most perceive that there is room for improvement.

Are Wiki's the solution then? Wiki's are at the opposite range of the spectrum, multi-threaded but not chronological. They are a great tool for a relatively large number of people to coauthor a "state-of-the-art" document but it is very difficult to keep track of the evolution of that document, especially when there is a large number of contributors.
So Wiki's are not THE solution but they are most probably part of the way to improve blogging.

This afternoon I tried a modest analysis of a number of popular web-based information sharing tools to identify possible patterns. I see 5 major dimensions that can characterise information sharing: individuals, topics, opinions, things and time.

Individuals —this is about people addressing an audience, talking to each other or reading what others write.
Topics —we are interested in specific themes and not others: In am into VoIP and peer-to-peer and not into gardening and pets.
Opinions —what it is all about: information, ideas, thoughts expressed, clashing and leading to others.
Things —for lack of a better word. Food for thoughts, almost literally: news, articles, events, books, new web sites, new products, etc. Anything one can have an opinion about.
Time —the organising principle that makes conversation and evolution possible.

Now most of the tools that we use today only capture 2 or 3 of these dimensions. For example a blog is a chronological (=time) list of opinions from one individual. As another example del.icio.us proposes chronological (=time) lists of things grouped by tag (=topic).

Major evolutions of this exciting field will come from new tools that will manage to integrate more of these dimensions and enable people to create and consume information in more flexible ways.

Examples to follow.