Blowing Up the Blogs
Jeff Jarvis wants to blow up blogs:
Blogs have already become prisoners of their format. Time to light some dynamite.
Well, sure. Anyone who implements web solutions today has run into this problem– the sweet spot for smaller-scale content management is an ugly space filled with blogging and nuke-like tools on one end and large-scale CMS wannabes on the other. The blogging tools are somewhat inflexible and used mostly for– well– blogs, and other generic solutions mimic their 100,000 dollar, 100,000 page counterparts too slavishly, making smaller site operations and management overly complicated.
When it comes to building a dynamic, syndicated site today, our toolbox essentially has a screwdriver in one drawer and a Zargoolkian Transmogrifying Multi-Dimensional All-In One Utility Computer in the other.
But, of course, none of this is about blowing up the blogs. Blogs work quite well– that’s why tens of thousands of people start using them every day. It will be even less relevant as more and more people get their bloggy information from syndicated feeds (directly and indirectly). It’s about blowing up the Content Management System space, which has become moribund.
Again, the terminology. I’m as bad about precision as the next person. When I talk about blogs and blogging I might be talking about micro-content publishing and CMS, or I might be talking about a philosophical approach to writing, sharing, and creating community. leave it up to the context to make clear. Of course that leaves open what to do when I am talking about both, particularly since they both involve and create overlapping benefits and values…