'After nearly four years at this, I've come to realize that I jumped the shark here a long time ago. I have to confess that my interest in the blogging format as a means of writing online is waning. Things have run their course here, at least in this form.
I think it's time to try something different. I've been watching the deployment of wikis and the work Anders Fagerjord is doing over at Surftrail with interest. The chronological format is too artificial and too constraining; it's a throwback to paper formats. In fact, the entire concept of blogs as journals, while perhaps a valid form, increasingly feels like a straightjacket to me.
Weblogs are evolutionary - what started as simple HTML pages of annotated links where early web surfers shared their observations concerning the new and cool sites of the nascent web have become a primary means of online personal publishing. This evolutionary heritage seems to me to be self-limiting. There is a very definite model that's emerged that defines how we blog. This model eschews many of the possibilities inherent in hypertextual writing, primarily in the name of familiarity and expediency. Worse, this model has become firmly entrenched in the architecture of commercial weblog tools, making it more and more difficult to do things differently.
Blogs have become the PowerPoint of the Web.
Which isn't to say that blogs aren't good, or that there's anything inherently wrong with the model - at least as a model of personal online publishing. There's a great deal of good to be said for this infant revolution in personal online publishing, and despite the regular muttering of my cynical side to the contrary, I suspect it is, and will, change the world.
It just isn't a good model for me anymore.'
