Blong: beyond the blog

Christian Crumlish

I'm starting a thought experiment around a next generation personal identity web presence tool that would replace a blog with something I'm calling a blong. It's thus far vapor-specified but vis-a-vis existing blogging practices it would have to at least satisfy my two prime design directives:

1. The geek's hippocratic oath:

   I will not take away any funtionality without replacing with it something at least equal if not better in the judgement of the users

   (need help on the wordsmithery there), and
2. xian's law of "convergence already"

   Thou shalt not give me any more gadgets unless you can take away two gadgets for each one you give me"

   aka, beware of geeks bearing gifts.

My basic spec for a blong would call for logging and collaborative editing capabilities as the fundamental knowledge management tools, maximized open-standards-based interoperability.

There probably won't be a single blong application, though a patched together solution like my (equally vaporous) personal expression platform might do the trick, as might Ftrain Sitekit, Scoop, CivicSpace, TextPattern (and possibly even WordPress, MT, et al. although the epicyclical workarounds are starting to drive me batty).

More likely a few tools that play nicely with each other will plug together in various combination, offering cycles or hosting or persistence in various service models.

I'd like to host all my own stuff, but if Flickr can do the photoblogging better than TypePad or I can, then I suppose I can swallow my pride and offload that responsibility to a commercial entity whose principals are not shadowy (they are googlable - they are present in the living web).

I think a lot of us are alloying our old ideas about home pages and web publishing with new insights from blogs and wikis and other social media of the living web and so I have multiple blogs, I narrowcast, I am starting public wikis and use them privately, my ideas about how to store and publicize and retrieve information are becoming more fluid. del.icio.us killed the taxonomy star.