Wikis, blogs, moblogs and more

Writing for online magazines, with limited comments facilities, has been a similar experience to writing for print publications. Your work is commissioned or you submit it, it goes through an editorial process, and it is then published. Usually, you get little or no feedback about the piece itself, at least feedback that reaches the magazine (again this is similar to print media). However you may find your piece discussed in blogs and discussion groups all over the Web, and perhaps you might get requests for reprinting (although this is not as often as when it’s published in print ).

But blogging is quite a different kettle of fish.

In 2003, prior to blogging myself, I conducted a survey and investigation of a few bloggers worldwide, in a piece entitled “The Blogosphere”, published in Quadrant Magazine in June 2003, and now available online. One of the questions I asked bloggers then was what were the advantages and disadvantages of blogging. Most people nominated as a great positive the fact you could air your opinions and ideas in a way that you regulated yourself, without being subject to the vagaries of editors, and also the immediacy of the contact with readers. However, the latter was also viewed as a big disadvantage by most bloggers, because of the extremely unpleasant and confrontational nature of some comments, and the way in which some people seem to only respect “free speech” if you agree with them. The following year, when I was invited to blog on the group blog Troppo Armadillo I discovered some of those things for myself.

At its best, blogging, for the writer, can be a terrific experience, enabling you to have genuine discussions with readers, and engage in the kind of thoughtful and illuminating speculation that can often inspire new ideas and new trains of thought in you. However, that is the ideal situation, and it’s rare, and precious. All too often, what the comments box turns into is a kind of dialogue of the deaf, with the original post hopelessly lost in a welter of tangents, parti pris positions, shouting matches, and a certain amount of intellectual bullying which I have found quite intimidating at times. It’s not that I’m a stranger to unpleasant missives - if you write publicly anywhere, you’ve got to expect negative as well as positive feedback - but I think that the medium itself has an atmosphere which makes people confrontational.

In part, this is a feature of cyberspace itself - since email has become more common, I have tended to get more rude communications than I used to when people had to write a letter. But the problem is magnified in blogs, and that may well limit their readership, and the writers who will blog. However, comments boxes are also useful because they actually archive all those reactions, and readers not involved in the shouting matches can draw their own conclusions. People who are new to public writing often forget that and don’t realise just what it looks like later when their intemperate words are visible in black and white for the world to see, for as long as the blogger cares to display them.

Now there is talk of “wikis” - a kind of constantly evolving blog, able to be updated and changed by anyone who cares to - as the new thing. But I think wikis’ strength and appeal are limited to groups of friends or class groups and so on. For the rest of us, it’s a bit like the “Choose your Own Adventure” fad of the 80s, distinctly underwhelming and with a limited life.

There’s also talk of new ways blogs could be delivered, especially as “moblogs” through mobile phones. But though I think blogs are here to stay, and the best bloggers will build up the kind of trust among their readers that some “old media” writers have, I still think it’s easy to become too sanguine about the life-changing, world-changing potentialities of new media, particularly blogs, Their individualism is both their strength and their downfall. Sites such as On Line Opinion, which deals in an interesting convergence of both “old” and “new” media, are different and will, I think, thrive as more and more baffled readers try to negotiate the wild world of new media.