Benjamin Clark

Wil Wheaton made a really great, heartfelt post last night that inspired a few thoughts of my own about the nature of online journals.

WWdN is what I would like to call an "A-list online journal." I do not believe it is merely a blog, although sometimes it certainly can be construed as one. Wil Wheaton has published two highly successful books based solely on entries from WWdN, which is more than can be said for other blogging celebrities. My personal opinion -- and this shouldn't shock any of my readers -- is that the success of these books is related directly to the rhetoric of the online journal, and not the more generic "weblog."

A book's lifespan is measured in decades -- possibly more if properly preserved, and obviously infinitely more if transcoded to other formats (digital formats, for instance). Books often provide their own context, or almost always refer to the works of others that are preserved in formats offering similar context longevities. Books can be read years after their publication and still have at least an embedded context.

Conversely, a blog post has a half-life of about a week before it loses all sources of context to the sands of time. Where a book's heritage can be traced back to oral storytelling, a blog post is more akin to conversations; stories are immortal, but conversations are not. Blogs are an entirely new form of time-critical hypertext to be certain, and perhaps that's where their popularity comes from, but essentially they're just a form of recorded conversations.

Here's an exercise: Recall a conversation that you had with a friend or colleague two years ago. Can you do it? Is it worth remembering? How about ten years ago? Is it still in your brain, or did you delete it to make room for other more important things? Don't feel bad. Most conversations have no reason to be remembered beyond a few days: once their context is lost, its almost like they never happened. A conversation is important in the here and now, but it becomes irrelevant all too quickly.

An online journal -- which I'm going to define here as autobiographical prose presented in a blog-like format, occasionally interspersed with diary-like log keeping and personal opinions (rants) -- has none of those longevity problems. It relies on no context aside from that of the author him/herself. I can talk about my recent trip to Indiana and be able to refer back to it a year from now without any loss of meaning (although by then I'll be reading it from the perspective of someone who has already moved there, been working there, etc.). In other words, it's worth saving. Wil Wheaton's posts about his acceptance of his ST:TNG past were worth saving in book form. And people bought them for their own libraries, most of them being avid readers of WWdN, so obviously there's something to be studied in that behavior alone.

I think what it comes down to is that an online journal provides original content. It relies on personal experiences, fresh opinions, and emotional insights for its context. An online journal adds new information, therefore justifying its own publication. There are only a handful of conversations worth recording, and most of them that I can recall resulted in political scandal. The majority of blog entries do not add content, but link to time-sensitive news articles and discuss technological or scientific announcements that will become irrelevant in six months.

Blogs are the joke e-mails that get forwarded around the network; online journals are the hand-written e-mails from close friends that you spend an entire lunch hour reading and replying to. That's where the content is. That's where the meaning is.

Everything else is fast food and reality TV.

(End rant.)