Riffing on how 's elder blogging might take shape.
Trend: linear spaces --> free form spaces
E.g. Powerpoint -> Figma
Google Docs -> Roam
Workflowy -> Mindmaps (e.g. Simplemind)
Blog posts -> Blogchains is kind of an attempt at this more "open" and "branching" narrative.
Conversation
At the same time - network topology has changed.
From one of aggregated "homepage hits" (e.g. Slashdot, Hacker News, Reddit) to one of streams and feeds of community interaction (i.e. Twitter)
In 2019 basically you put a timestamp on something and... well, Ok Boomer.
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Feeds of communities evolve, get messy, self reference and importantly are revisited and re-formulated on the fly. Timestamps are an outdated attempt to impose order on a natural chaos.
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So. What might 's elderblogging turn into? My theory is:
1) A lightweight regular email (as a push-mechanism and heartbeat of aliveness) that surfaces threads, ideas and moments-in-time from the chaos
Paired with:
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2) A free form space (or set of spaces) that are alive, without time-stamp and look more like Figma, Roam, Mindmap than blogpost. Ready for a post-writing, post-publish world.
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Some things this enables:
- A more vibrant community and interaction model (a speed up of the community feed)
- A shift from making sense to community making their own sense of raw materials
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And finally the Big One (tm) that this enables is the ability to do "just in time" insights (perfect for feed based worlds) where can snapshot parts of the open canvas (figma, mindmap, roam whichever) to make a point in real time without breaking stride
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Does something like what Substack enables with a newsletter + threaded conversations with the same readership point in the right direction?
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not really - substack doesn't change the received experience of author -> community. It simply enables in different ways.
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Agreed. Substack is a point solution for harvesting the end-of-life blog market into the email ecosystem, which seems more robust/long-lived. It is less a successor to blogging than a sort of upmarket retreat for blogging being disrupted by threaded open media
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Really, that's what you're talking about Tom. My elderblogging personal phase just happens to synchronize with the elder stage of the medium itself. Of the 2 dynamics (me getting old, blogging getting disrupted by threading), the latter is the more important one obviously.
For sure - but you're "crashing" first as the canary in the coal mine for the rest of us. A useful point of study.
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The thing that threaded media misses I think is what are the raw materials? Where is the substrate for the fast-threading? Feeds and threads are too ephemeral (by design) to carry the whole narrative.
I'm arguing that some free-form space will replace the blog as the substrate.
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