I have to admit: I’ve never been a big fan of Dave Eggers. Planks of jealousy, I suppose– hard not to be jealous of his juggernaut ride to fame, positive critical reception as a genius author, brilliant and beautiful wife, and the general perception that he is cooler than all the rest of us combined– reinforced with a thick paste McSweeney’s cliquishness and and my annoyance at his barefoot appearance on some C-SPAN BookTV panel. Puhleeeze. But this speech genuinely moved me. Not only is the 826 Valencia project simple and amazing, but the obviously nervous Eggers was endearing, even earnest. I feel guilty at my smallness when it comes to Eggers and how it has colored my feelings about his writing and other work when he demonstrates the passion and sincerity I sorely need to cultivate in myself!
This is such a cool concept (and so wonderfully executed) that I have to steal it for myself… or someone. An annual report for a company of one. I’d have to make up a lot of data that I’m not detail-oriented enough to keep.
I’ve been singing the same tune as Hugh MacLeod in classes and at conferences for a while. If people are blogging less now it is only because so many other ways of being present and participating are available, each of them particularly suited for a particular kind (or granularity) of expression.
Twittering and Tumbling and Facebooking aren’t preventing people from blogging… they are creating new ways for people to express themselves in ways that blog engines– in all their variety– fit only approximately at best. Something that fits well as a Twit is going to be at best wedged into the stream of blog entries. If one can share something through a Facebook widget satisfactorily, then the impulse probably didn’t need to find its way (at that point) to a blog entry or wiki page.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that people have mistaken a single kind of tree for the forest. I’m guilty of hand-wringing about the death of publishing when publishing continues to see explosive growth when what I am really unhappy about is the lack of publication of the writers and kind of writing that I have grown to have a particular interest in. Let’s forget about the dying of the blog and start paying attention to the incredible wave of lightweight, frictionless, gatekeeper free participation mechanisms that are now at our command for utterances large and small.
Does the word “blog” really mean anything anymore? When a term encompasses sites from BoingBoing to Borderland, and MetaFilter to Quantum Gravity in the Lab, how is the term useful? Saying “I don’t like blogs” is really saying “I don’t like the net” or “I don’t like things being published.” I doubt most who use those words actually mean that.
Blogging was never the point– participation, presence and publishing were. There’s a reason so many of us were blogging before there were any blogs and now spend time trying to make others see the publishing revolution that is at-hand and of far greater impact than the word “blog” can hope to represent.