Writing Online

It’s worthwhile to read jill/txt, a blog maintained by Jill Walker, an associate professor at the University of Bergen who researches online story telling. A recent post on an assignment for her students asks them to look at their own blogs individually and as a group using the criteria of

- content
- layout
- writing style
- kinds of accessories (blogrolls, link to facebook profile, comments, etc?).

With these criteria, the students are to determine if their blogs are in the same genre or different ones, and how they match other genres in “art, film, television, or literature.”

Neva Chonin interviews Brad Fitzpatrick, the creator (at the age of 18) of LiveJournal, now a community of 8 million users. Chonin notes the differences between LiveJournalers and bloggers:

There are differences between the worlds of blogs and LJs. LiveJournal’s user base skews young, drawing a large proportion of teenagers, whereas blogging tends to attract users in their late 20s and early 30s. Additionally, LJ is seen as a private space for networking and interpersonal discourse; blogs are viewed as one-person publications directed toward a larger audience. A growing number of people maintain both an LJ and a blog, but the two camps traditionally don’t mix, with some bloggers dismissing Journalers as trivial kids and Journalers mocking bloggers as wannabe Web stars.

Fitzpatrick and the Trotts hope to erase some of those assumptions, especially after Six Apart introduces its Comet platform — expected out next year — which will combine the public platform of blogging, the community interaction of LiveJournal and the networking of sites like my MySpace.com.

In looking at the genres of websites, blogs, and other online environments, we might expect interaction among them (and print) that generates new genres.

Earlier I mentioned Jon Udell’s post on the influence of technology on writing. Now, the Read/WriteWeb is looking at how mainstream media are increasing their use of web 2.0 services. From their table, one can see how major newspapers are using not only RSS feeds but also digg and del.icio.us, and to a lesser extent, newsvine. It will be interesting to see how online and offline genres will continue to interact and influence one another.

In addition to media, it seems that business in generally is embracing web 2.0 technology. In the DMNewsBlog, Giselle Abramovich reports on research showing that companies are adopting social media.

A University of Massachusetts Dartmouth survey found that the fastest growing Inc. 500 companies adopt blogging, podcasting and other social media as business tools and a majority of companies consider social media to play significant strategic role.

The blog “waggish” has posted “Genre: Thoughts on blogs and genres” and concludes:

Blogs are not content-focused, in that the content rolls by too quickly to be lasting. (Yes, they provide content, but when it’s so subject to being missed or disorganized, the structural integrity of the content is not the focus.) But nor are they personality-focused. If Josh Marshall started writing exclusively about Andrei Tarkovsky tomorrow, he would lose much of his audience, who would nonetheless stick with Kevin Drum. Not to say that they’re the same, but they are not unique in the way that novelists are. They can be replaced.

Blogs, then, are topic-focused. (And by topic I effectively mean the definable gestalt of the blog.) Individual content matters less in a blog than sticking to a consistent topic over time. And this is where the analogy to 30s romantic comedy seems apropos; these movies too stuck to a remarkably consistent topic, and the individual variations were practically indistinct. To put it another way, it was up to the individual to distinguish what variations they preferred, because the level of homogeneity was so high. And so it is with any given blog, or even with a blog genre. The difference is that the medium makes it that much more difficult to ever separate out individual works for praise, and so the gestalt is left to stand on its own. In the 30s, people could see one movie and remember it well, whether it was good or bad. In the medium of blogs, that’s not really possible; you absorb an entire gestalt as you consume them.

This produces two diverging effects: either people get lost in the mass of repetitive, homogenous content and process what they happen to run into, or they abstract quite heavily to synthesize large amounts of data into a graspable gestalt. Sort of like reading Balzac.

What do you think?

Note that waggish has two more posts on blogs: Thoughts on genre: Blogs and improvization and Thoughts on genre: Blogs and practice.