Ray Davis has a thoughtful analysis of blogs in light of some research on 18th century magazines. Basically, he uses the familiar sounding historical circumstances of 18th century magazine publishing to make some assertions about where blogs might be headed. I agree most of what he says - although I'm a little skeptical of his hope that "the low-cost grazing inherent in the weblog form could exert some tiny influence against social splintering and towards recognition of the commons."
My own sense is that the peer-review-through-linking process is leading people to be more and more insular in their reading. The blogosphere can be tremendously disorienting in the sense that it's hard to get a sense of where it extends from wherever you happen to be standing. The latest thing for me (and Davis hints at this in his piece too) has been the discovery of so many poetry blogs, a phenomenon that somehow escaped me despite the fact that I've been blogging for more than a year and am arguably a poet myself... [via bertramonline]
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