Woah, this is so weird. I was searching for bad flash sites for a critique in my web design class and I stumbled on a totally unrelated link to my old professor MGK's blog. Hi! I was in your Cybermedia class at UK. I'm about 3 months from graduating in New Media at IUPUI. I still remember your class and several concepts we covered have come in handy. Most notably I was able to appear very smart and cultured when I knew who Nicholas Negroponte was just by seeing his picture. I know this comment has had nothing to do with your entry, so I'll try to throw in a comment about mailing lists. Remember that kooky German guy who signed onto our Cybermedia listserv? Wasn't he hilarious? Okay, I have achieved some minor relevance to the entry and now I will stop rambling. Good luck with your blog!

Have been thinking about this some, myself, especially as I've been involved in the recent discussions on emergent democracy that Joi Ito touched off (which spawned a listserv that hasn't really taken off, as well as a "weblog channel" through topic exchange that's been quite active; http://topicexchange.com/t/emergent_democracy/

At the same time, I've found myself posting less often to a mailing list that I've been a part of for over seven years now.

However, I'm beginning to realize that these are really elements on a spectrum. E-mail is quite personal, and clearly defined in terms of recipients; mailing lists expand the number, but are still a closed community; blogs continue the conversational mode of mailing lists, but do so in a way that's more public and permeable than lists.

There are a number of things I might share on a mailing list (at least one that's not archived publicly on the web) that I probably wouldn't post on my blog (rants about my personal life, for example). The closed nature of the environment provides some "protection." While not everybody on a list may agree with me, there's a sense of community, identity, accountability.

On weblogs, what I gain in accessibility and new connections is balanced by the fact that there's more vulnerability. My connection with Joi Ito would never have happened if I hadn't been able to simply post a comment to his blog. On the other hand, not all comments are productive, and not all conversations do best when they're thrown open to all comers.

So if I'm any indication (and I might not be, since I'm not a typical user of most systems), it may be that listservs will dip a bit with the growing use of blogs, but that they'll regain some mindshare as we all sort out the ways in which the media facilitate different types of conversations.

This might be time to bring up the difference between push/pull in information technology. Email is generally a push technology, it sends information whether you want it or not. The web is generally a pull technology where you have to go find the information. If you remember back in the old days of the web, the mid 90's, there were things like pointcast, and other material that pushed data to your desktop, that is what email is like, and lists and that is why nearly everyone one thought it was a killer technology, but it proved not to be as strong as people thought because the information practices of the web, which the technology was built on, seems to have different assumptions. Lists have different assumptions than blogs as email has different assumptions from the web, and these assumptions are in part described along the push/pull conceptualization.

I agree with Liz Lawley's comments regarding the "closed" (relatively speaking) community of listservs versus the "vulnerable" and public world of weblogs. However, I would complicate these comments by arguing that a community of sorts does appear to exist with weblogs, though it is more public than the listserv, and there is a certain "closedness" to it. I know Matt through non-internet interaction, but I've been visiting his blog out of curiosity more than I ever visited his old homepage (for obvious reasons). And now I know who Liz Lawley is because Matt has linked to her (I've started checking in on her blog, too) and because she posts to his comments.

There is a kind of community in this, as well. I'm not really part of it, though, not because I feel actively excluded but because my academic home field is the eighteenth century. I will probably not meet many of the new media / digital studies / information science folks at conferences and such because I (more than likely) will not be attending them [well...never say never]. But I imagine that many of the people drawn to, linking to, and commenting on Matt's blog will be meeting in person at such venues. In this way, the network of blogs does serve a similar purpose as the academic listserv and there is a kind of "closed" nature to the network.

On a different thread: the entry ticket of expertise for the listserv is relatively low (Can you email?), but the entry ticket for a blog is considerably higher, even if you're not using Movable Type (Can you do [basic] html? Can you ftp? Can you tweak your code? Do you understand TrackBack?). And if you're using Movable Type, well, that seems to ratchet up the required expertise even more. This is obviously going to affect who participates in listservs and who in blogging.

George, I agree that there are communities in blogging. When I first started (waaaaaay back in October :-), I wondered "aloud" how permeable the boundaries of those communities were--and I've found them to be quite open to new "members" and ideas. The interesting thing is that the boundaries are so much *more* fluid, I think, than in mailing lists. And many of the connections get made right here, in the comments, where people "discover" each other. I would never have met someone like Joi Ito were it not for his blog. Or AKMA, for that matter. (What I wonder is whether these connections will happen as easily as the medium scales...)

As to the entry ticket for a blog, if you use something like blogger with blogspot hosting, the entry ticket is pretty much negligible. No HTML, no FTP. Just click, type, go. And I expect that the bar will continue to drop, lowering the barriers to entry. (It wasn't that long ago that setting up an email client was equally challenging to the non-technical user...)

I do think, however, that weblogs will be less widely used than email and even listservs. They're for people who like to write, and that's not true of the majority of the population.

So I suspect they'll continue to provide a middle ground--one that bridges the gap between publishing and conversation, and allows for a more flexible, personally-defined form of community.

(Oh...and as to the push/pull, tools are already being developed and polished that will make reading blogs more of a push environment. You'll be able to choose.)

Liz, I agree that blogger/blogspot is extremely easy to use, but the more advanced features available in something like Movable Type seem to be the things that make blogging such a powerful community-based tool.

To fully participate in the community, one would need to have a certain proficiency with those tools. I believe the number of people who would have that proficiency (or the willingness to acquire it) is lower than those who have figured out how to email.

The eighteenth-century discussion list, for example, features many subscribers who, while quite knowledgable about the period in question, do not have the most sophisticated understanding of contemporary information technology. I sometimes think that email is the outside boundary of what they are capable of doing. I can't imagine these people starting up blogs, though it would be great if there were an active eighteenth-century blogging community.

I also think that (certain) readers might tend to assume more authority in a well-designed and feature-rich blog than they would in one that is relatively bare-bones. So one's proficiency at such features would affect one's position in the community. To be honest, though, this is just speculation on my part.

That said, I'm finding blog reading to be much more interesting than the listservs I subscribe to. (That might be because blogs are relatively new to me.) I've just this week unsubscribed from C18-L (the eighteenth-century listserv), while I've increased my blog reading.

This is, in part, because I wanted a break from the constant stream of emails from the listserv, not so much because the topics of discussion weren't interesting. If the same conversations were taking place in a "pull" environment, and I could choose to log in to a central site to read through the various threads of discussion, I would more than likely continue reading.

And finally, there is also something to be said for the aesthetics of blogs over the (I won't even say vanilla because vanilla at least has a flavor) non(?)-aesthetics of email. The design sensibility of blogs surely affects the reading experience, and each blogger can establish a certain identity through their design. Email pretty much looks like email.

{And speaking of design, Matt, how about increasing just a tad the "line-height" style attribute of your comments section?}

Matt,

I distinctly remember earlier this week, even as late a yesterday, seeing attached to this post a type of graffiti-like tag -- a sequence of letters that did not appear to make sense in English (at least they didn't appear to be an anagram). Almost tempted to write to the email address attached to that comment and ask if the fingers had slipped on the keys.

Irony was that this "piece of noise" [now purged] directed me to read the entry on blogging versus listservs because the blog software picked it up and created a link from your recent comments list.

Something about the indexical nature of nonsense?
the iconicnatureofnonsense?

but now that link/comment is gone. retrievable? untracable [no HTML so I need to point to the c cedilla <<< in untracable :) ]?

Looks to me you took George's advice and changed the line height but where's the record of what it used to look like? does it matter? some users would copy and paste portions to read and apply their own style...

it seems that user behaviour offers mediating instances between form and content

and memory mediates behaviour in that lovely dream state rifts in that "i thought i saw" vien

Did I?

And I swear I was not puppetting graffiti from a fake email address!

I am intrigued how a scrap of writing whether semantically null and void orients reading.

And yes, one senses, a new form of blog entry that taps into the archive potential (and the ephemrality of erasure) -- a sort of "Dada, made you look" genre: point and dash? (automated as a bot) Now that is something not likely to happen on a moderated discussion list.