Doc Searls is one of the most prolific webloggers on the planet. He’s also one of the best, with interesting things to say several times a day. His writing’s addictive, mostly because it’s so “uncomposed.” By that I mean that he doesn’t edit himself very much at all, so we get a pretty good representation of what’s going on in his head, before it gets filtered by his writer self. That probably doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you write a whole lot, either for a living or for love.
Today, Doc’s got a great piece on social software, wherein he tries to answer the question posed in this piece’s title. Doc thinks that most of the best webloggers write because they work alone, as “cave workers,” and need to talk to somebody. Anybody.
While Doc was writing white papers for Motorola about groupware, I was writing books about it. Turns out my assumptions about workgroup computing, like Doc’s, were partially wrong. Doc says that he remembers being told by Reese Jones, founder of Farallon, that all human communication is one-to-one. I agree that’s probably true, but only for us, the last unwired generation. The Internet has clearly demonstrated that network topologies and protocols are clearly useful for much more than a long printer cable, as early AppleTalk users just as clearly remember. In a word, it’s collaboration. But I suspect that Jones is as right now as he was then: it happens best when it happens one-to-one. Garcia and Hunter, Lennon and McCartney, Watson and Crick, Jobs and Wozniak, the list could go on forever. What these great collaborators did was basically provide a mirror function for each other. And maybe, just maybe, that’s why we blog.
Since our brains protect us by only letting us hear one conversation at a time, and retain only meaning, not specifics, Doc thinks that social software—like Google and weblogs—helps us deal with our short term memory limitations. I think that’s probably true for us old farts, but again I think it’s a generational phenomenon. I’m pretty sure those under 30 are fully capable of having more than one simultaneous conversation. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it. Maybe it’s evolution. And now that it’s more hip to be wireless than wired, I guess we need to come up with a new label.
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