06 aug 06
During the lunch keynote at BlogHer, one of the questions posed to Caterina Fake and Meg Hourihan was “what is the future of blogging?” or something to that effect. Meg said that she would like a blogging tool that would tell you what similar posts you made in the past while you were composing a new post, the idea being that you wouldn’t write the same thing/link to the same things. This is a pretty good idea, and with how (embarrassingly) long some of us have been blogging, surely we’ve repeated ourselves once or twice.
One of the brilliant things about Vox is the Question of the Day prompt. There’s never an excuse for not posting, because there’s a new topic built-in daily. And yeah, it’s a little like doing a meme, but Vox is on a similar level with LiveJournal for me, in levels of seriousness and relevancy. (Yeah, I love answering quizzes and surveys, too. I just find them self-indulgent at best and not particularly interesting to others.) But, bottom line is, it gets you writing about something different every time you answer.
This is at least a step towards something I’d like to see in a blogging tool—sophisticated and adaptive writing prompts. For example, it could suggest things based on past posts, headline (or obscure!) news, and maybe even links from Delicious tagged with keywords it knows you are interested in. It’d be something to get you started but a lot more transparent than a daily question.
Sapphire / 07 aug 2006 / 10:01 a.m.
“The future of blogging†is such an expansive scope, not the slightest satisfied by a “new†tool, especially the savorless suggestion. To color like a sci-fic nut, I envision elite neighborhoods of akin bloggers where topics discussed simultaneously and members are manacled to a singular post of movements.
“Question of the Day†sounds like a restricting rail to ride. Bloggers shouldn’t feel obligated to update day in, day out. Only when your output is valuable, do pull the release cord. Don’t snatch a topic out of the water, as supplied of prompts and try to spin yarn. You are better off poking at your innermost thoughts, even if they don’t splendidly intermix into a solid at first.