Someone must be blogging about blogs, right?

December 30, 2007 2:02 AM

Is anyone out there publishing analysis or actively tracking interesting developments/trends in blogging in terms of the emerging patterns in the form and functionality of the blogs themselves?

The type of stuff that I'm thinking about is like Luke Wroblewski's Blog Interface Design 2.0 article (2005) or the posts on blog layouts that Jonathan Boutelle was doing (2005-2006) - the examples here are focusing more on the nuts and bolts, although I'm also open to coverage/discussion of more macro-trends (flare, codes, tumblelogs, migration onto social networking sites, etc).

Barring that, if anyone's seen anything really interesting in the past year or two, post away.

posted by lhl to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Hi Leonard! Today I came across a proposal for a research paper titled Blog Software and the Act of Blogging, which might be a useful lead. Other than that, I've seen Jeremiah Owyang blogging about how using Twitter affects his blogging and some other people talking about how using del.icio.us affects theirs, but not much about the form of blogs - I was hoping to read a bunch of interesting responses here...
posted by dreamyshade at 6:18 PM on December 30, 2007

Hey Britta, thanks for chiming in, this question was looking pretty lonely today. I'm guessing part of it is that it scrolled off the homepage pretty quickly and its the holidays...

Part of it also, I think, is that there really isn't all that much out there. I did a fair amount of asking around and searching before posting this question, mostly to see if there was anything I missed.

There are a fair number of blogs that are focused on the content/business/traffic side of blogs (The Blog Herald, Performancing (owned by the same company), ProBlogger, etc.) These weren't really what I was looking for, but they do include some nuggets in there I suppose the fact that those are the only things I could really find being updated also says something.

Some thoughts on the meta-question (if there isn't anyone publishing about this, why not?)

• One obvious response is there's no analysis or coverage because there isn't anything going on or anything interesting at least. I don't buy that since just taking a quick look I see a lot of interesting stuff going on
• Everyone who used to have the free time and expertise writing about that stuff is busy building or commenting on either newer or proprietary things. This I find a bit more believable, again, because that backs up my experience both personally, and all the people I can think of.
• As blogging exploded, the "form" stabilized both w/ the tools and in popular conception, and while changes can still diffuse quickly, there's no 'locus' per se to reflect upon them. That is "blogs" was always a handy catchall, and what we've seen are individual tools that have extended and focused on specific parts of the original impetus (i.e. Flickr, del.icio.us, Twitter) and simultaneously, integrated as a feature of SNS sites (MySpace, et al).
• There are new things brewing, but I suppose those might not be called "blogs" any more than blogs were called "what's new" or "home" pages

posted by lhl at 8:18 PM on December 30, 2007

I'm fascinated by that dark shadow of the content/business/traffic side of blogs - made-for-ads splogs/websites and the community that produces them. (I think about it a lot for work.)

But yeah, I think the form has stabilized somewhat and people are more interested in pontificating about the shiny offshoots. But I can think of a bunch of interesting changes I'd like to read about too - the ramifications of the different ways that people choose to integrate their "lifestream", the impact of switching from blog format to tumblelog format, etc.
posted by dreamyshade at 4:24 AM on December 31, 2007

I am currently only blogging about blogging at the Blog Herald but I am writing about blogging for my thesis. The working title of my thesis has changed from "Blog Software and the Act of Blogging" to "Blogging for Engines. Blogs under the Influence of Software-Engine Relations." It deals with the increasing symbiotic relationship between blog software and blog engines (such as Google Blog Search and Technorati) and how the engines influence the blog, blogger, blog software and the blogosphere.

Michael Stevenson wrote some interesting posts on (spam) blogs:
* Pingback Spam, Popularity and Protecting Investments
* blog.google.com: Internet finally subsumed by Blogs
* It’s the definitions, bloggers.

And Jill Walker Rettberg is working on a (new) book on blogging.
posted by silvertje at 10:57 AM on January 4, 2008