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Wed, 06 Mar 13

Blog - O' Sphere, Planet, Spiral, Galaxy

Abstract Link Interpretation Dutch Blogosphere - Anne Helmond

While some may today consider blogs as the “legacy layer” of the web, they continue to be insightful sources of information. If you consider the evolution of Usenet into newsgroups, bulletin boards, mailing lists and forums, blogs were the mutation all the others loved to hate.

While newsgroups, boards, forums and lists have switched technology underpinnings and went from being distributed as email to being centrally hosted on web services, they have always emphasized group cohesion. Discussion is threaded, presentation is homogeneous, styling is minimal with small concessions for avatars and indentation. Social forces are channeled through voting, karma, reputation and moderation.

Blogs amp up the self-expression. They allow unlimited personalization and customization. Blogs focus and project the persona of the author. If they allow discussion, it is on their terms with complete control over comments and content. Their format emphasizes stand-alone, coherent and structured thoughts. A blog is a great mechanism to record readings, learnings and opinions.

Naturally, blogging is not for everyone and many blogs sputter, stall and die. Yet, many tens of thousands revive or keep going strong. They can be considered a kind of techno-fluential signaling mechanism. Tracking blogs, therefore, is a good way to gather really useful information.

Over the years, several mediation tools have been developed to combine the homesteading of blogs into a community of like-minded people. Metablogs aside, two successful variants are planets and aggregators which combine activity from several blogs into one feed.

With memamsa, you can easily aggregate a set of blogs into topics of interest. As of now, you can do everything that a blog planet can do, without the hassle of running the software on your server.

Here are some examples worth checking out:

  1. Progressive Realist
  2. Clojure

We are just getting started. Stay tuned as we improve memamsa.

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