Whither the blogosphere?

The other day, someone sardonically quipped that "blogging is so 2006." Y'know, I think they might have been right.

What with the rise of Facebook and Twitter, it seems that the practice of starting and maintaining a personal blog has fallen from favor, at least among our circle¹. I had the feeling that this was the case, so I decided to check it out by looking at the blogs from the original League of the Underemployed gang -- we friends who all jumped into blogging in early 2005 -- and compare blogs² from July and August of 2006 to July and August (to date*) of 2009:

Viva! An Experiment: 17-8, 21-3*
Stave It Off, 1,2,3: 14-3, 9-1*
Ned Said: 11-1, 17-0*
Independence Days: No data - shuttered
Life with Jon: No data - shuttered
HKC (vs. WalakaNet): 30-6, 30-1*

Wow. I had expected a decline, but not that much. What's the deal? Have we run out of things to say? Umpossible! Were we bored with the medium? Maybe, widgets or no. Were there other outlets for expression? Definitely.

It's hard to deny that Facebook bleeds posts away from a blog. Here's an example: I rode the brand new Link Light Rail and the not-so-new-anymore South Lake Union Streetcar line, both for the first time, yesterday. Back in the day, I would have spent the time composing a nice little essay about the adventure for the blog. What did I do yesterday? I posted this status update to Facebook from my phone: "I just got off the light rail and am now on the streetcar - ain't it cool?" Not quite Proustian, that. As an added incongruity, the person I shared the adventure with, Dingo, would never see the post - because she's not on Facebook!

I don't think I am alone in this sort of practice; Facebook does allow for quick and easy updating, and it's hard to beat that convenience. It's also great for sharing photos and links, and it has the added bonus of speaking to a somewhat screened community. Setting privacy issues aside, at least you know you're speaking to people who want to hear what you have to say -- they have chosen to "friend" you and include your posts in their news feed. These characteristics make Facebook an attractive channel for the same expressions that in 2006 would have found their way onto a blog.

In some ways, this bleed-off can work to make a blog healthier; leaner, perhaps, but healthier nonetheless. I know that I think more about a wider audience when I write for this blog - posterity, if you will - and use it as a space for practicing control and writing more structured pieces. I cannot speak to the motives of my blogging colleagues, but their work seems to be a bit more considered as well. There are fewer posts overall, but what's gone are the short blurbs and the offhand remarks; what remains is the developed writing.

Well, if Facebook handles all our socializing and our blogs remain focused on essaying, is there a down side? I think there is. What has gone missing is the place for [links/observation + short commentary] - a form that comprised a considerable portion of 2006 blogging.

Facebook allows links, of course, and you can even comment on them as you post them. But considering that the typical length of discourse on Facebook is about 20 words, and that your full text comment is put behind a cut at about 40, it doesn't encourage or leave a lot of room for an even minimally developed response. But with the current refinement of the blog contents, anything less than a fully-formed text seems depauperate in that context. So where do these mid-range utterances - too long for Facebook and too short for the blog - live?

Twitter is certainly out - the 140-character limit is a step backwards from Facebook limits. It may find its place in the communicative spectrum, but this isn't its role.

We could start another blog just for these medium-sized posts, where they wouldn't look out of place, but then our friends would just have yet another place to have to bookmark.

We could follow the maxim that the middle of the road is the most dangerous place to be and commit to either brevity or magniloquence, eschewing the mid-range post altogether.

Or we could just throw caution to the winds, as I am about to do, and throw a link-farm post onto our blogs every now and again. The interweblogosphere is changing, that's for sure, but the questions till remains: how will you know what I had for lunch unless I blog it?³

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One of my technological favorites has always been the pneumatic delivery tube. Seen today only rarely, usually at bank drive-up windows, these cool and steampunky systems were still very common when I was a boy, transporting receipts from cash registers to the main office in big department stores and moving documents around large office buildings. Well, there are two different engineering proposals, documented by the folks over at Wired, which, while not strictly speaking pneumatic, bring back a little of the romance of the almost-forgotten systems.

The first project is The Cargo Tunnel, a dedicated network of four-foot-wide tunnels that would house a tiny little subway for the delivery of packages to homes and businesses, complete with tiny forklifts at the terminals to handle packages up to 18" x 18". The coolest/scariest part of the proposal is that self-guided TBMs (tunnel-boring machines) would create the network without surface life being any the wiser, like an attack from the cyborg moles. What could go wrong?



The second project is actually called the Urban Mole, and it applies the same principle to an existing network of tubes -- the sewer system. That's right, drop your parcel into a little carrier, seal it up tightly, and let it make it way through the thick and turgid waters of the sewers until it pops out at its destination. The article provides no details on the disinfectant bath that would have to be in place at the receiving terminals, but I am sure they have thought of that.


Y'know, maybe pneumatic tubes weren't such a bad idea after all.

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I ran across a little online application called Personas our of MIT that attempts to represent your online presence graphically. You tell it your name and it searches for occurrences, using some kind of algorithm to rate and rank the surrounding words to determine the context of each instance. Then it squishes all the information together into a color bar. Here's mine (click to embiggen):


This looks pretty accurate; at least, there are no big surprises. But my name is extremely rare, if not in fact unique. (I go egosurfing fairly frequently and I have never encountered another me.) For anyone with a more common name, the results can be quite distorted. The Personas group says that this is a feature, not a bug, and that the process "demonstrates the computer's uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world." So, there you go: reflection is the goal, not accuracy. Try your name and reflect away.

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1. Special interest blogs, such as Let's Not Talk About Movies and Quiet Girl Gallery, as well as commercial blogs, still seem to be thriving.

2 Lowcoolant came and went as a Blogspot blog during this time, but TormentedbyDemons had been and continues to be active on his MySpace page. Since MySpace is a social networking site, this seems to align with my point, albeit obliquely.

3. I de-cobbed some leftover corn, mixed it with some leftover mashed potatoes, frozen peas, three cut-up veggie link sausages, and some slices of Red Torpedo onion that Dingo gave me to create a sort-of shepherdess pie. Mmm-mmm.

Water wheel turns 'round

One of the endearing characters in the recent heartwarming film Up is Russell, the enthusiastic "Wilderness Explorer" who inadvertently stows away on the flying house. Russell is the quintessential over-achieving, over-equipped Boy Scout (non-trademark-infringing type), just like my friend Davey Callaghan, who made First Class Scout and had twenty merit badges while I was still a Tenderfoot (and who one summer collected enough coupons from gathering empty milk cartons to go to a Mets game for free not once, but twice). But despite all his gear, Russell is missing something important. He's got the mess kit, and the flashlight with the 90-degree angle in it, and even a bugle, but there's no canteen.

When I was a kid in the sixties and early seventies, canteens were the most essential piece of wilderness gear (ignoring for the moment that closest I ever got to wilderness was camping on the edges of the vast Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills). Some lucky kid might have an old army surplus canteen, the kind that Sgt. Rock had in the comics or that Vic Morrow had on Combat! on TV. Others, like Davey, would have a specially-purchased Boy Scout model. The rest if us had whatever we got from uncles or older brothers, camping store remainders or bargain basement specials. But wherever the canteen came from, this silver jug, so cool to the touch on a hot day and infusing the water with a metallic tang, was the first and most important piece of survival gear, and we all knew that no soldier or explorer would be caught without one (we had seen Sahara with Humphrey Bogart).


Of course, this concern with constant hydration confined itself to Boy Scout hikes and our imaginations; I didn't know any kid who carried a canteen on a regular basis, when just hanging out or playing stickball. No, the "civilian" canteen didn't start appearing until the early eighties, contemporaneous with the aerobics craze. Suddenly, all sorts of people, mostly women, were wearing Lycra and legwarmers and flinging themselves about to get their heart rates up. That kind of activity wears a person out, so it became more common to see people carrying plastic water cups around. These started to get more elaborate, with sealed lids, and sippy straws and handles and places to put ice in separate from the drinking water. These "sports bottles" are pretty rare now, mostly because they were too ugly to keep and made of plastic too crappy to last, but at one time they were so popular that the Zippy the Pinhead comic strip blamed them for the infantilization of society because of all the nipple-sucking they required. (I hardly ever see the classic ones anymore, but encountered something like one at Goodwill not too long ago.)

Of course, it wasn't long before the whole drinking-container process got more complicated. On the one hand, the instant-gratification and convenience movements of the nineties begat bottled water in individual disposable bottles, available first in vending machines and eventually in just about every retail establishment on the planet. Gone was the mess and fuss of actually filling your sports bottle with water; just buy a new one each time! (I have often thought that if you could go back in time to Atlanta in 1950 and tell the Coca-Cola board that someday they would be selling their stuff without even having to put sugar, color, or carbonation in it, they would all just die from pure avarice.) This trend butted up against the political-statement-making and environmentally-conscious threads always present in our culture, and a significant and growing portion of the population dropped the disposal bottles for the nearly-ubiquitous Nalgene bottle of the oughts.

Of course, Nalgene bottles were added to the list of Things That Can Kill Us and all of a sudden sipping from one was tantamount to courting horrible death. Like Superman changing the course of a mighty river, public opinion modified the trend and metal containers became la mode. Silver or colorful, with or without carabiner, as long as it was stainless steel, it was cool. There's one a foot from my elbow as I type. It can feel so cool to the touch on a hot day and infuses the water with a bit of a metallic tang.

So, you can probably guess where this is going: a lament that I didn't keep my old canteen, since that's what we've essentially come back to. In fact, that's how I had planned to end this piece, until I saw this ad and realized that we no longer have to hold onto our memories, since the consumer-industrial complex will be happy to sell them back to us anytime.


That's all, folks. Stay hydrated!