Leon Paternoster had the following to say in his microblog a few weeks ago:
Instead of publishing blogs in isolation, why don’t we form blogging collectives and publish all sorts of magazines?
That sounds like contributing to a “community blog” to me. I know there used to be a lot of those on the Web. The only active ones I can think of off the top of my head are Crooked Timber and Less Wrong, and I recommend avoiding the latter unless you are interested in the writings of self-styled rationalists rationalizing their way into espousing fascism. There are probably more, of course, so if you know of any please let me know by email.
As for why more people don’t participate in community blogs, I can’t provide a universal answer to that question. However, speaking strictly for myself, I have a few reasons of my own:
- Nobody has invited me to join one.
- I can’t be bothered to start one and do the work of recruiting contributors.
- I am not particularly amenable to working with others outside of my day job.
It’s not like I participate in writers’ groups, either. It’s not like I don’t or can’t play well with others; I merely prefer not to.
Also, community microblogging is alive and well. Leon himself should know, since he syndicates to micro.blog and to Mastodon. Twitter might have become a Nazi bar under Elon Musk, but I won’t believe it’s dead until the twitter.com and x.com domains no longer point to an IP address when I ping them.
Of course, parasocial media isn’t the sort of blogging collective Leon had in mind. Nor does it necessarily publish online magazines, as 32bit Café does, though they call them events or code jams instead.
The reason I generally “publish a blog in isolation” is the reason I have a personal website in the first place. On my personal website, I am a sovereign individual in a way that I can’t be in the “real world”. I answer to nobody there. I can write as I please, on any topic that interests me, and publish when I want to. It’s my work, done my way.
I am amenable to participating in collaborative blogging efforts like 32bit Café’s events and the IndieWeb Carnival because I retain control over what I write and publish. My contributions are still on my website. The main page — the magazine, if you will — points to my website. Should the people running the event decide that they longer value my contribution, all they can delete is the link to my post; they can’t touch the post itself. Thus I retain ownership of my work.
Perhaps efforts like the IndieWeb Carnival and 32bit Café’s events might be better termed “community syndication” instead of “community blogging”? Then again, maybe the name doesn’t really matter as long as there’s more of it for those who want it.
For my part, while I would be reluctant to write for anybody else’s website but my own unless I’m getting paid (in US dollars or Euros, not in exposure). However, if somebody wanted to link to something I’ve already written on a non-commercial website, that’s perfectly fine with me. Likewise if my website is crawled and indexed by a non-commercial search engine. Finally, if somebody wanted to reproduce something I’ve written in a non-commercial webzine, I’d be fine with that as long as I get a byline and a link to the original post.
All of the above, incidentally, seem like good ways to overcome the Web’s discoverability problem to me. The Web needs curators as much as it needs creators. Remember: Only trust your links. Google will never help you.
