If the web is participatory, and I really think it is, then how come blogging can feel so lonely?
After I wrote about participation a couple of weeks ago, it brought me back to a question that I return to from time to time. Do blogs, like this one I’m writing in now, need to be so lonely? Not always, but sometimes, I feel like I’m shouting into the void.
I’m picturing something relatively simple. Something like a group blog, or a blog co-op. A group of internet friends posting together, without too much oversight or coordination between them. When somebody has an idea, they post. Others can respond to those posts in new posts. Or not. And together, a group of people chip away at a blog together. Personally, I’d love to be in a group like that.
Leon Paternoster blogged about the idea of blogging collectively last year.
Well, you could start with an actual collective – a group of likeminded internet folk co-authoring a manifesto or corpus of shared principles. Perhaps it would have a shared website, although maybe we want to keep our own blogs (but why?, Leon). The website could syndicate its members’ posts, formalising existing connections and networks, and maybe extending their reach and size in the process.
New technologies create new possibilities, and something like a collective blog is more possible than ever. However, Paternoster came back to this idea recently. He points out that the blocker isn’t a tech problem. Rather, modern blogging is built on top of a techno-individualistic mindset. It’s something that requires one to teach themselves a set of technical skills, preventing it from being a more communal pursuit. This is especially true in the current era of the web, when centralized platforms absorbed most of the web’s content, and only left space for individuals with time on their hands.
But of course, the idea of a collective blog is not novel or new. The web was social by design, after all. I can do what I always do, and look to history for analogs. As with most things, I found some.
That brought me to Fray.com, which was created in 1996 by Derek Powazek. Fray.com collected stories from whoever wanted to contribute. The only rule was that each story had to be written from an individual’s point of view, but other than that, each contributor was free to write whatever they wanted, in whatever format they wanted. Each week, Powazek would post a couple of new stories, remixed and adapted through a maze of hyperlinks for the web, sometimes accompanied by graphics. The result was a kaleidoscopic blend of voices that always felt fresh.
That was kind of the point, actually. To encourage active participation on the web.
Afterdinner followed a similar path, alos launched in 1996, allowing short story submissions from people that it would feature on its homepage. They’d change as often as the site’s creator Alex Massie could manage. But there was no shortage of story submissions, and no shortage of visitors. Massie had a particular interest in collaborative sites, and the way it could amplify voices that might otherwise be ignored. “I’d love to be the next Fitzgerald,” she once remarked in an interview, “but, more likely, I’ll have more impact on the world by finding the next Fitzgerald, and I’m content with that.”
Massie ran a similar collective experiment at the time called Regarding, where a small group of contributors recorded themselves and posted clips on the site. That ended up being the model that some other blogs took—a group of a few people, or may be slightly more, that all blogged together. The most notable was probably BoingBoing or Shakesville, but there have been others over the years.
Massie and Powazek were both following the idea that the web was participatory. That just felt obvious to them, and most of the people on the early web.
As a kind of proof of that, Fray.com was one of the first sites with a guest book, a place where people who weren’t contributing full stories could still participate. It was secondary to the site itself, but guestbooks in general became pretty common after that. And the came comment sections, which started in a few places but was popularized by Open Diary. Before long, comments were a stable fixture of the web.
It wasn’t just comments, of course. Forums created a backbone to the participatory web that was extremely important, borrowed from the Internet days of BBS. The Trackback was introduced by Movable Type as a way of connecting blogs together, and giving them a way to talk to one another. Sites experimented with annotations, and public submissions, and live feedback, and so many more.
I still plan on tracing a more complete history of comments, but as a rough outline, they were pushed to the bottom of the page by the early 2000’s. By the 2010’s, they started falling off completely, inundated with neglected spam and flame wars. This made them pretty easy to turn off, which a lot of sites did. And some of that natural participation of the web fell off too.
The poetic part that Alex talks about, I think, is when you take the microphone away from the journalists and start telling your own stories. That’s the blessing of the web. That’s why we flock to it, to tell our own stories, to weave words that are both journalistic and poetic.
That’s Powazek, talking about what Massie did with Afterdinner. That was the intent back in 1996, when they both kicked off their sites. Comments and trackbacks and forums weren’t supposed to be where web participation ended. This was all just meant to be the first step until the technology got better. The blog was meant to be a place where people could come together and interact with one another, not a solo soapbox.
Which kind of reversed the original intent of the web. Trackbacks and comments and forums were meant to be a first step. Even with blogging, if you take a closer look. Blogs feel the most meaningful when they are a place where people can come together.
What’s old is new again. Trackbacks have finally evolved into a true social web backed like protocols like ActivityPub actually integrated into the fabric of the web, which is getting more mainstream by the day. Forums have been reincarnated as Discord groups or dedicated communities. It’s possible that even comments are making a comeback.
And there are now, and have always been, some group blogs out there. Sites like The Midnight Pub keeps the experimental nature of Fray alive. Journalist collectives like Every and Flaming Hydra or The Last Word on Nothing are carrying the torch of a site like Regarding. And there are certainly others.
So why not collaborative blogging? Why not groups of people coming together to create personal blogs? Something less formal than a journalist collective, but more communal than a personal blog. Blogging collectively opens us up to a new kind of content, one in which members of the blog are in conversation with one another in a way that’s comfortable and unique.
That idea is really appealing to me. Anybody else? Reach out if it is.
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