It’s exciting to see blogging coming of age. It’s interesting to see it referred to as being a ‘higher quality’ medium than others.

That would seem to contradict Wired’s ‘tsunami of bilge’ definition

For us web obsessives it makes sense that the blog would provide an additional space in which to expand thoughts beyond 140 characters but for ‘normal’ folks wanting to make a mark on the web I would expect that it is still the number one medium of choice.

And it is this approach to blogging – purely as a publishing platform (rather than an extension of other online activity) – that is partly to blame for this ‘tsunami of bilge’ (to misquote the Wired article) in the blogosphere.

Forget novels, could the horrible truth be that there is a blog inside all of us?

Twitter in particular has proved a great source of ad-hoc information, but it’s not really a good medium to browse through and expand on a topic – it’s transitory only. Flickr has slightly more permanence even though the backlog archive I’m sure gets largely forgotten. However, a blog seems more like a library of thoughts and information that can be dipped into a referred to constantly, helped by the tagging and cross-referencing that seems to be intrinsic to the medium.

I’d rather see blogging evolve than just chucked on the rubbish heap just because some people are using it differently.

Ironically, now it seems to be regarded as passé, FaceBook is rather good at drawing many of these thing together in a better way than FriendFeed.

My other main problem with the ‘distributed’ model is the amount of linking up that has to be done. For example now I’ve found you I ‘have’ to go through each of the services we’re both members of (e.g. flickr, friendfeed, linkedin, twitter, etc.) and link up. I want a single click!

However, I still very much enjoy longer, less frequent and better written blog posts. I’ve personally unsubscribed from almost all of the blogs that seem obsessed with “the daily update” and instead read those that post less / better quality articles.

For me, the blog function has moved from being “in the know” (I too get that from twitter/IM/etc) and more about well-considered opinion. Related to this, I find myself blogging very much less – once, I was a “post a day” man, now I post once every couple of weeks – and I think my readers appreciate it. I spend longer thinking about articles, feel less pressured when writing, and think the quality has gone up as a consequence of this.

i really like ’social habits’ as well, very neat term