Matt Scofield writes about wikis, fact checking, and the evolution of blogs (he's riffing I guess on this post from Positive Liberty). My own feeling is that blogs work best when they're about personality rather than (news) content, and that it's usually a mistake to imagine them with the framework of traditional media. This doesn't mean they can't be news sources or perform an essential (and relatively new) auditing role for the media -- but Matt provocatively suggests that there's another format that would fit this kind of role better than the blog.
Specifically, he wants to see wiki fact-checking implemented, so that political discourse can move toward some kind of consensus. I'm not sure we can really say consensus comes out of that particular design -- it seems to me it's more about accuracy, by successive (and collaborative) approximation. But the point is still valid, because some of the most important work of the political blogopshere has to do with accuracy in the media. Wouldn't larger, more collaborative sites facilitate faster information transfers, thereby increasing the accuracy of statements and giving individuals the tools necesssary to fight misinformation? And, couldn't they therefore serve as more effective platforms for political activism? Maybe high profile political blogs with comments section already fill this role.
Frequent readers know that I'm not crazy about political blogging -- that I find it almost suffocating because everyone is out there saying the same thing as everyone else. For the same reasons I also find it wasteful (although I suppose one could argue that this "waste" in political ideas is actually a profoundly democratic activity), so maybe the attraction of larger, collaborative sites is that they'd make the whole process more efficient. The tradeoff would be a bit of personality, but while personality does go a long way, activist and fact-checking blogs might not have voice as their focus.
Anyway, there's nothing really new about blogs; there never really was. Yes, they eliminate a lot of the transaction costs associated with publishing (although there are still significant costs associated with building a readership) and create a comfortable format, but that's about it. What's really new is the networks between and among blogs, places where political discourse can happen, artistic communities can form, obscure interests can connect. Sure, blogs can have great value, but it's of the same magnitude as the value you'd get from the same material published in any other format. The networks between them, though, have value on a different scale -- which is why there might be something to this idea of separating them out, forming wikis, or Matt's Lycea, or whatever else. This could why we see this agglutinization process with blogs becoming group blogs.
By the way, I haven't written anything here about it, but I'm always thinking about how the internet can be made to serve collective artistic ends. Sometime soon I'm hoping to have a series of posts here detailing some of my ideas and getting interested readers engaged with the process of collaborating on how to collaborate. (Will someone say my blog is the wrong format for such a discussion?)
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