Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

"Blogs can be read only through the blog author" only if they lack comments, which you can think of as corresponding to scrawls in the margins of a book or the glosses that you find, for example, in Bibles. It's an open question to me whether a Web site is a blog or not if it lacks facilities for this intersubjective exchange, this process of debate and progressive clarification, around a central text. This process can correspond more or less precisely to the process of anonymous milling (editor, copy editor, graphic artist, proofreader, fact checker) that goes into a bylined journalistic story. The journalist gets the credit, but it's the copy editor and fact checker, often, who save his lazy, junketeering butt. ;-)

People tend to think of literary works as having a closed structure, organized around the omniscient narrator, but that's not necessarily true. Think of the Canterbury Tales, in which each narration is related by a different character, whose personal motives reflect on and enrich the tale they tell and their reception of the other tales. (This is an example of what Bakhtin called "The dialogic imagination," if a high-falutin reference will win me some credence here)

If you want to maintain that the blog is nothing but "personal publishing," what's the advantage of it? Reading on the screen? I'd rather take the Times into the living room than sit here in my dank lair, or better, to the non-WiFi'd to talk it over with some other folks. I blog because that whole process — reading, discussing, re-reading, and even re-writing — occurs right here in these MozillaWindows on the world.

You might be interested in some of my comments on Small Pieces over in my domain. I'd love to have your reactions recorded in my comments, or on the wiki, if you like!

Actuallly, Steve stressed (and I mentioned) how important user interaction (comments, replies) is to blogs as a genre. That's what makes the blogosphere ever-changing, unlike interactive fiction which is unchangeable once it's published.

I just took a very quick scroll through your comments on Small Pieces. Looks fascinating. But I have to run out to a dinner thing at the conference I'm at (oh, boohoo, poor me). More later.

fascinating is a nice of putting it! It's blurt, but there are whorls of coherence here and there. Maybe.

Your statement ". . . interactive fiction is done and finished whereas the blogosphere is always under construction." suggests authors of interactive fiction (and other printed articles) may as well be dead, while bloggers must be alive. But, what becomes of the author's thoughts when a blogger writes their final article?

How does one then "discover the author", which you agree is an essential step? Libraries have evolved methods to do so for print authors, but I know of no such thing for bloggers. How can you conclude the tool (print vs electronic)is not important?

Sorry, failed to enter my name on above.

When the blogger enters the big blogosphere in the sky, obviously s/he's not going to be writing any more entries. (Ouija blogs anyone?) Even so, the thread is open to being continued forever.

John, the tool is clearly important in how it impacts our techniques/capabilities for reading and writing and, therefore, what we produce. David'd first question to me at the conference following my paper was to confirm that I agreed with him on the point (which I do). This is true of blogs, novels, letters, road maps, anything we read. But tools aren't singularly important: how we read and write blogs (or other texts) matters in additional ways, too.

David's point that the thread remains open even beyond the presence of the author is crucial: while the context of a novel or piece of interactive fiction can be expanded without the author, the text itself cannot, whereas a comment added to a blog post becomes, in the way it is accessible to us, essentially part of the original text. Whether blogs can outlive their servers, on the other hand, may prove to be another issue in the near future.

The text of the paper I presented is available here, with a more detailed explanation of these points (I hope).