I realised today that there's a lot of overlap between "Rebooting the Blogosphere" and "Regrowing a Living Culture". The Coffee Mornings that I'm doing at the moment have that latter tag line and the question is coming up for me of how to regrow living culture online as well as off. As a very bare minimum, we have a shared google doc that people can put things in that come up in the Announcements slot at 11:00 – it's OK, especially for that group at this stage in it's development but I'm yearning for more.
I've spent today thinking about it in this frame: "If we were going to set up a kind of C4CC again, now, a space that was an intellectual and physical home to a number of groups and small organisations, how would we capture, nurture and nourish the knowledge creation activities of that network of people?"
In 2010, most of us were on Twitter, Facebook was going through an explosive growth spurt and although they were starting to tinker with algorithmic feeds, you pretty much got the latest posts from friends in reverse chronological order, Google Reader dominated the news and blogs via RSS ecosystem, Foursquare let you check-in to locations if you wanted to be found IRL. The blogging folk at C4CC had taken a mis-step, but we didn't know it yet – we relied a lot on posterous which allowed creation of posts by e-mail (including attachments). Not only was that useful for those of us who wanted to be able to post from anywhere, but it also made collaborative blogging easier. I made one for people to submit and write about their "most interesting" flickr photos for example. That link of course is to a salvaged version rebuilt on wordpress.com because posterous was bought up by Twitter in 2012 and closed down (with fairly clunky export facilities) the following year.
Now, in 2025, Twitter is unusable for lots of people and there is no single place where that form of microblogging mixed with conversation still goes on. Facebook continued along the feed manipulation path to satisfy its advertisers, Google Reader got snuffed out, flickr remains for now, Foursquare is Swarm, but it feels now like an underground game for people who can't let it go.
With all these changes, we now find ourselves in a place where it's hard to trust any big tech platform with something as precious as your own thinking. But I think if we can get back to "small pieces loosely joined" and take responsibility for the ownership and stewardship of our data, there are opportunities for us to regrow what we had. And the appetite is still there. Often I come across it in people who didn't really get into this fifteen years ago, either because it was the wrong kind of nerdy for them, or because they were only ten years old then.
I made some notes on the things I thought were important for trying to do this in 2025:
Everyone should have a place to publish that feels easy, and doable, and low-stakes. This is about reducing the barriers to publication – a newsletter or a blog (as most people understand it) feels like too much, like there are established formats that you have to stick to. Totally open microblogging either feels at risk from trolls/abuse or pointless because of the overhead of finding your people/having them find you. So I'm thinking of something where you can choose your own policy on openness and commenting. What if the collaboarition platform you're using now (Slack/Basecamp whatever) were open by default, but you could mark some things as private?
An RSS aggregator that does more than aggregate – by adding functionality to search & filter but also repost/link/reply (all subject to individual policies) it becomes a common knowledge store – it needs to not be Facebook! Whatever small pieces you put together, they need to be interoperable and RSS is still a great way to do that (and it isn't owned by anyone). I think that it's possible that the rise of the newsletter format has to do with the familiar functionality of email and that it feels like your own space.
People might just want a linkblog. A place to just share something you've seen somewhere, with minimal commentary – a lot of email groups I'm in end up with most of the traffic being this. As a group activity, it might become like del.icio.us – aggregated across the group with tagging. An extension of this is a reading list (of people/orgs outside the group) or externally facing blogroll.
Rich records of gatherings whether they're in-person or online. This is about bringing the discipline of minute-taking and sharing recordings/transcripts (with permission) to the things we do together. Ideally, decentralised to all members of the group. What's the minimum expectation of someone attending a gathering – what norms do we want to establish about sharing back afterwards?
Some hierarchy is useful. So each group has it's own group blog/aggregator, but aggregation is also possible at a higher/more general level. If I am just on the edge of this network, I don't have to pick through everything else to find the things that are relevant to me, but I can see (and contribute to) the bigger pictures if I want to. This raises questions of autonomy and the principle of subsidiarity.
Writing is not the only fruit. It's important that learning can be shared through audio-visual media by those who find that more accessible.
Lo-fi is OK. This is part of lowering the stakes. If you're walking away from a meeting and making a voice-memo for yourself to remember the things that struck you, or If you've just sent someone a voice message and you realise that what you said might be useful to others (and doesn't breach privacy or confidentiality) then you should be able to post it as a podcast. Audioblogging and Videoblogging are still a thing! And transcription has improved greatly.
The overall purpose is to facilitate the growth of a web of knowledge (and thereby enriching connections between people) both by adding new content and adding links between existing content. Sometimes you'll want to turn your list of links into an essay, sometimes you just want to say ooh, I saw this and it made me also thing of that.
There should be a way of capturing some of the value of all this in commercial products, the income from which should then be shared in an equitable way between the various contributors (including the network as a whole).
This is a bit of a jumble. I know there's a better way, or order, to organise these ideas in, but for today, my brain is tired.
Perfect Path 