[Williams senior, WSO superstar, and incoming A9-er, Evan Miller, corners me by simultaneously writing me an email and posting it on his blog. This is my reply.]
To: Evan
Subject: Re: Are letters better than blogs?
Evan,
Congratulations on coming up with a clever way of getting me to respond to an email. I've fallen way behind on correspondence of late. Not out of disinterest or disrespect, mind you, but simply due to a lack of time to sit down and write a proper letter.
Your notion of reinventing the concept of a blog is intriguing. I tend to agree with you that there are several categories of blogs. If I might try to further enumerate the list:
Commerical Blogs: Written by a person or a team of people that view the blog as a primary outlet for content. Often monetized via sponsored links.. Examples: Boing Boing, Engadget, Gawker.
Corporate Blogs: Written by people on the payroll of a corporation that makes money somewhere other than the blog. Usually not monetized at all. Examples: Google Blog, Yahoo Search Blog.
Topical Blogs: Distinguished from the commercial blogs only in that they tend to be a labor of love, rather than a part of one's job. Examples: It is hard to give a good example, because if a blog like this is big enough to reach the top 100 or so, it has also probably turned into a commercial blog. Ephblog is one that I read.
Personal Blogs: The biggest category of blogs. Personal content written primarily for friends, acquaintances, and fans of the author. These can even get popular enough to make the author some money via sponsored links and ads. It also includes, at the low end, what I call "cat blogs." But at the high end, some of the more interesting personalities on the web. Examples: Kottke, Dooce, Megnut.
Professional Blogs: Could also be called ego blogs, but that's not an insult. A blog written by one person on the topics that they specialize in. This person typically uses the blog as a tool to support and enhance their visibility and marketability for their day job. The line is sometimes hard to draw between this and personal blogs, other than that the professional bloggers rarely, if ever, talk about their cat. Examples: Battelle, Spolsky, Gruber.
Not Blogs: Or, syndicated feeds that really aren't blogs but still can be read in "blog readers" because they expose RSS/Atom wrappers around content that originally and primarily appears elsewhere. Often monetized by driving people to primary destination website where paid subscriptions are available. Examples: Wired, BBC News, Slashdot, Dilbert, Fark.
What categories did I leave out? Looking back at the list, I'm not sure it's a very accurate ontology/taxonomy.
Your idea of introducing letter writing into a blog seems to fall within the category of personal blogs, but it adds a twist that makes it interesting. Many people are trying to improve on the models of internet dialog, (see coComment, or Trackback), but those solutions are bolted on and will always feel artificial. Your idea is more organic and is an interesting synthesis of an old familiar communication paradigm (the "open letter") with contemporary tools. I like it in theory. And it practice, the idea of the open blog letter must be at least partially successful, as I am writing back to this before any of my 100+ emails still tagged "To Reply".
But there's one potential problem, at from least where I'm sitting. I don't like blogs. Or more accurately, I don't like blogging. I never have, and rather wish I never installed MT, Bloxsom, or WordPress in the first place. Blogging is an albatross.
What I do like is writing content. The best of that content tends to be in the form of long articles that discuss things that I am learning about. The worst of it is... Well, the worst of it is a lot like a typical blog post.
I've said before that I'd like to blur the lines between a wiki and a blog. But what I really would like is to go back to having a place where I can post articles in such a way that I can go back and refer to them, edit them, update them, and promote them, all without feeling boxed in by the sequential and serial nature imposed on us by the syndication formats. When you visit unto.net for the first time, perhaps because you saw my email address and were curious as to what I did, what is the best/most relevant first impression my site can make? Is it this letter? Is it the 20-word post mentioning that I'd be at some conference? Probably not. But all you'll get at the top of the page is what I wrote most recently.
Ultimately what we need is a way for people to author content in the way they see most fit while simultaneously giving others the flexibility they need to respond and remix as they would like.
My current thinking (see the new project) is that I'd like to build a loosely-structured data store that can facilitate real-time searches for related content. Content will be loosely-structured insofar as it will be driven by microformats, from generic XHTML to more structured elements such as TODO lists or calendar entries and the like. The relationships will be explicit for the most part -- i.e., this comment is in response to that comment, this message in response to that one, etc. This engine (named Houston, btw), used in conjunction with Orchard, would form the core of a replacement for the current WordPress software I run today. With a little tweaking, I could imagine it also driving the more "letter oriented" blogging approach you describe.
I apologize for making little sense here -- I mean to write up a better outline of Houston in near future, time permitting.
Is this response to your letter adequate? I feel like I simply tried to squeeze a proper article into the required format. But truth be told, I always feel like I'm squeezing content into the wrong format whenever I write a blog post.
I like where you're going with the idea of breaking down some of the established patterns in the blog world. While we would probably arrive at different places with our efforts, much good will be found when people push harder on what it means to pushing content on the web.
In terms of beginning a dialog, I say you're on to something. You certainly got me to respond...
Cheers,
-DeWitt