Are blogs journals? When I think of a “journal”, I tend to think of something that is best called a diary. And that’s kind of what most blogs are – diaries. Which then makes a lot of sense that there is a popular site is called LiveJournal. But the best blogs end up not being journals in that sense at all. They seem to fall into one of two categores, both of which could also be described as journals, but since that word has already been horribly overloaded, I will call them best-of lists and essay collections.
The ones we might usefully term best-of lists are things like BoingBoing and Kottke.org, where very little original content is produced. Instead, with mild editorial gloss, a link gets proffered for the reader to check out. The reader can then do so, safe in the feeling that this link has been vetted and will be in the spirit of the website. This is not to say that what lies behind the link will be safe for work, or pleasant to read, or even well-written. It just means that what lies at the other end of the URL is something that the list’s author, whose role is best described as an editor, thinks is interesting.
Best-of lists are ever-changing, and this is where they derive most of their power. By being consistent in their output quality and quantity, these best-of lists attract people who want to stay informed, but don’t want to have to read the entire Internet to be so. They truly do seem to act as editors and content gatekeepers. This idea of best-of lists has moved from officially sanctioned editors of newspapers, to places like Slashdot and BoingBoing, and is now (and this is old news to most of you, but bear with me) being crowdsourced at sites like del.icio.us and Digg and Reddit . It remains to be seen whether the wisdom of the crowds, or your friends, or the strangers who seem to like the same things you do can ever reach the relevance of human-sorted material. I’m pretty sure that editing and providing content is not just a selection problem, however.
“Editing” is the wrong term here, because it connotes some ability to copyedit, so I’m going to switch over and use the term decider with a nod to DFW. Deciding what to include and what to gloss over isn’t just figuring out what an audience will like, it’s also generally done with an eye towards what they should like. Editing isn’t just deciding what is good and what isn’t, it’s also deciding what other people should think is good, and the best best-of lists do a fantastic job of this by throwing in stuff that is old and new and crazy and familiar. It’s steering people’s evolving taste andd not just reacting to it. In this way, they are more like memetic radio DJs than editors in any traditional sense.
With this DJ analogy, we notice two things right away. First, that makes the linked-to sites more like recording artists and most decidedly NOT DJs (even though the linked-to site might be a “weblog” or “journal”), and secondly we might recall that the way that DJs made money was payola and advertising. Payola is perceived as being somehow not “genuine” and ends up turning off readers and listeners. When there was a limited number of radio stations, payola was able to prosper because every radio station did it. Nowadays when people decide not to visit a website there are hundreds and thousands of alternatives. This means that payola truly kills the golden goose, because it causes people to seek out any of the almost-inumerate competitors. It also means that advertising is the only way for these sites to prosper.
Sometimes the advertising is in the form of referrals to Amazon, and sometimes it is Google Ads or Preject Wonderful. Nonetheless, the way they make money is by interesting you enough to follow their recommendations, but not so interested that you don’t also check out their ads. This means that sites who actually understand their role in things don’t take money from just anybody. As an example, Penny Arcade has lots of ads for games, but all of the games and ads are vetted to make sure that the games don’t suck and the ads aren’t too painful.
The other category of blog seems to be the blogs that almost needn’t be a blog at all. Instead, it is an ever-growing collection of essays and observations from the author. The only blog-ish thing about them is that the essays were written using blog software, which is generally easier than just hand-write HTML, and that the essays appear in reverse chronological order. It is possible to subscribe to these individual authors, but it seems most people subscribe to the tastemakers and trust the deciders to notify them when something sufficiently interesting gets written. In this way, authors get two categories of readers – fans, who read everything they ever wrote, and incidental readers.
A group of deciders who get together and mark as notable an ever-growing (and often internally-referential) stream of essays is then the creators of an even older thing. Because now, instead of being a misnamed little-j journal, it’s a properly named big-J Journal. As in “The New England Journal of Medicine” or “The Journal of the ACM”. By being editors of consistent taste and linking to interesting documents that are of a theme, they have helped foster a dialog just like all the people in academia do. Only the discourse is louder and faster and much more readable.
Seeing this system of blogs and writing and information dispersal being used to spread videos of bad japanese television instead of greater understanding and knowledge of the universe and our place in it leads to frustration. This frustration expresses itself in various forms. It has led to the Open Access movement, and it has led to people making their own work available on their own websites with exhortations to read it. What it by and large hasn’t led to is people writing papers that people actually want to read. I read academic papers every day, and while the ideas are often fascinating, it’s frustrating to have to tease the interestingness out of the crappiest prose this side of The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
How can we set up reward structures that encourage researchers to actually make their research readable? Some have suggested that we include video, but as near as I can tell nobody has suggested that the real problem is that the ideas are almost uniformly explained incredibly poorly. People are coming up with ideas and expressing new ideas, but they can’t just link to explanations of unfamiliar terms, they instead restate, in their own (generally inferior) words exactly what all these terms mean and how they will be used. People can’t provide animations or demonstrations when it might be useful. Readers can’t ask questions in an effort to clear up points of confusion. In other words, academic writing sucks because it is an alpha version of hypertext.
Let’s get it together people! We need someone with enough authority and clout to create a credible journal to create a journal of hypertext. Then researchers can submit papers that actually describe their research and nothing else. And then, when someone wants to summarize those papers, they can link to the actual research. And it can be in little chunks so that people can link to subparts. This ends up sounding a lot like the semantic web and the original reasons for the creation of the web, but the part I’ve never seen properly articulated elsewhere is that the status quo sucks not just for the interested amature, but also for the more sophisticated reader and researcher alike.
Everyone would be well-served if big-J Journals could take a few cues from weblogs and serve content up in a more digestible form. Then we could have open access journals of concise scholarly work which were self-supported through ad revenue. We note here that, if a scholar didn’t want to have ads appearning near their work, then they could pay something that is analogous to todays “page fees”. In this system, the best journals would receive more exposure, interested people outside of academia could find out about the cutting edge of science, and researchers and readers alike would be free to just state their results and let the people who are good at explaining things give the (optional) background material. By using this method, results will be expressed more concisely, but they will also read a bit more like a lab diary. Which means that, if we can figure out how to get from here to there, we could get a system where we no longer have to split hairs when we are talking about what a journal means, because it would be an academic document that read kind of like a diary, but where only the most interesting diaries were accepted.
We could have a journal which linked to journal articles that read like an actual journal, and everything would be easier for everyone. The researchers could obsess about getting results, the writers could summarize when the body of work got a bit bigger, and the editors could point out the most interesting bits. Everyone could do that which they were best at, and anyone could read the results.
