Web software developers and designers, more than any other creative people, often believe their mission is to rethink the conventional.  What is accepted as normal needs to be changed up, turned on its head, simplified, complexified, innovated and delivered with some cute and bizarre moniker right away.  The new thing becomes accepted and the cycle starts again.  This churn brought us successful ecommerce, online auctions, Twitter, blogs, social networking applications, online video, and so on.  The creative cycle is also the business cycle, with a few Web concepts becoming wildly successful and most others less than a footnote in Wikipedia.

In my experience, Web logs or blogs arrived and matured in no time.  And that time was about 2003.  As reported in Wikipedia, the term “Weblog” and “blog” originated in the early 1990s.  Tools, conventions, and some standards evolved well before I noticed what was going on.  In 2004, my wife and I attended the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, mainly to understand how blogs and other “new” Web technologies were changing the face of the Web.  We also learned something of the impact of the Web on publishing in general and other forms of media.

Now practically all forms of social networks or media provide blogging capability.  Blogs are so pervasive that they have even become the universal hammer that makes every problem look like a nail.  For example, Telligent has a Content Management System (CMS) called Graffiti.  Oddly, this particular CMS is noted as “Blog Software” on its product page, and Graffiti actually is a bit of a re-thinking of blog software architecture.  Does that make it a content management system?  There are similar products out there.

The early blogs were online journals that provided timely updates from their authors.  The latest post appears on a main Web page, the others are available in order of posting.  Some blogs show posting hints on calendars for just this reason.  As blogs have become more sophisticated, they have incorporated category tags or open tag lists (sometimes shown as “tag clouds”).  These features, along with searching, provide a way to discover posts based on content, rather than posting sequence or date.  This blurs the line between an online journal and indexed articles.

I would argue that even modern blogs do not provide the kind of publishing that an article format provides.  On the Web, an article shares the characteristics of a printed article in a magazine or essay book (a book composed of independent articles).  An article can be longer than a blog, so long that scrolling in a single Web page is uncomfortable.  An article may need to appear in several linked Web pages.  An article may have a sidebar or supporting content (on the Web this may be video), which demands better, more flexible layout than most blogs.  In fact, since blogs should be laid out simply for consumption by blog reader software, layout and paging are the critical differences between the two formats.  A blog can be consumed in a browser or reader, a Web article is meant to be read on the Web.

The context for Web articles is also different from blogs.  Perhaps the time a Web article is published is of interest, but the sequence doesn’t matter at all.  A Web article may need the context of a table of contents, or several indexes (just as you would find a table of contents and an index in a book).  Some other method of discovery or linkage may also be worthwhile.

I think it’s time to stick a fork in blogs and declare the technology “done”.  It is super useful and a wonderful thing.  Perhaps something new and crazy great will happen for blogs, probably not any time soon.

I’ve been working on tools for easier Web article publishing at no great priority.  I admit I’m not a workaholic Thomas Edison, spending 20 hours a day to find the perfect solution.  But I think some creative and innovative Web developers or designers out there could really make an impact in this area.  Rethink the old magazine article format in a shiny new set of Web tools and standards.  Let writers write instead of hand-coding links for an online book framework, let people be creative writing on a Web without hard boundaries.  I’ll be watching from the sidelines, cheering you on, and waiting to see the world change again at SXSW.

-- Walter Lounsbery, 2-16-2009