Lawrence, so much in your post, and I am short of time, but I will try to
clarify why I am interested in blogs and other social software.

Ever since I fell into LambdaMOO for the first time, I have been fascinated
by immersion in the third space of the digital.

When blogs first came along, I was very disparaging, seeing them as vehicles
for tedious narcissism. I absolutely opposed the idea of a trAce blog,
believing it would quickly turn into a sump of banality.

However, at the same time I was also becoming disillusioned with online
communities. The trAce webboard, once intelligent and lively, declined into
a place which was friendly but largely empty of actual content. I heard from
all over the place that other communities were in decline and closing down.
People who had once belonged to 10 discussion lists for forums were cutting
down to 3. Online community seemed to be losing its way, and I was finding
it less satisfying than before. Even LambdaMOO, which by the early 2000s was
becoming seriously old, had lost its cast of mad and sparkling artists.

In 2004 I needed a website for Hello World, and after a few clumsy attempts
to build one myself, hit on the idea of using a blog as a content management
system. I  excuse myself from posting about my latest hairstyle or what I
had for breakfast (which is what I thought a blog was about) and would
instead organise and upload all the content I would have put into a website
if I'd been skilled enough to make one worth looking at.

It was in learning the mechanics of a blog that way that I started to become
seriously interested in them. In the ten years of trAce I had always been
intrigued by the latest developments in online community tools - now, these
tools had a name - they were called social software. And they performed
functions I had not imagined before - they did not just enable chat and IM
and knowing who else was online, but they also enabled users to build
communities via their writing and images in very new and unexpected ways,
using filters, XML data and RSS feeds as its lungs and muscles. This is the
blogosphere, and it really is an unimagined culture of interconnectedness
with huge potential for social cooperation.

So when I suggest we switch to a blog, I'm not really talking about benefits
or not of changing how the messages are received (email vs web interface
etc) I'm talking about how the messages themselves interlink and become
membranes between us and beyond us in ways that simply cannot happen via an
email list. Now I know this has plenty of downsides too, but I am interested
in finding ways to solve those issues. In fact I am very interested in the
notion of having both a blog and a list just to see what happens.

Most of the pro-list comments here seem to be about being able to download
messages and read them offline as and when it is convenient. Quite a lot of
them give the sense that the messages are entities to be controlled,
avoided, lifted out of the flood of detritus, kept in their place until
needed.  This is very different from being immersed in an always-on RSS
environment, and I can easily see how the two are incompatible. In fact,
they are two fascinatingly very different examples of 'writing and the
digital life'.

(and I haven't even *mentioned* starting a wiki yet!!!!!)

Sue

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