A couple of interesting experiments going on with blogs and books..
Dave Munger is taking the blog on a test drive as an ebook reader, putting together what he calls a “blook.” To show he means business, he’s chosen Moby Dick as the pilot text (but before starting, he’s working out formatting issues with Melville’s short story Bartleby, the Scrivener). I’m intrigued by the idea of using the blog form to generate discussion of a text – breaking it up into serial posts, jotting notes and analysis in the comment stream. It could make for a nice communal reading experience, as in a lit class, or virtual book club. It’s a game: drop the book in the blog and it ripples; different subjective worlds (of the readers) converge and collide. It’s very suggestive to combine this most conversational of media with the frozen, linear novel. For solitary reading, however, I’m not convinced that this would be a useful format.
Spark Armada, a “digital lifestyle, social software, creativity and science fiction conversation hub” in Israel, recently kicked off the “Keyboard” project, inviting bloggers to post stories on their sites that will be considered for inclusion in a print anthology. The idea seems to be to use the blogosphere’s mode of interwoven conversation as a way to generate creative work. The endpoint may be a conventional printed object, but Keyboard is interested in taking a different route in getting there.

“Baghdad Burning” collects roughly a year’s worth of posts from the blogger known as Riverbend, the 25-year-old Iraqi woman who has been electrifying western readers with her regular reports from the tumultuous heart of the American occupation. But do blogs necessarily stack up as books? Conversational Reading points to a San Francisco Chronicle review that says they don’t, just as binding a stack of news articles does not make a coherent work of history: “‘Baghdad Burning’ fails because the characters and anecdotes are too varied to establish a compelling narrative.” Riverbend may very well have a good book to write, but “Baghdad Burning” just seems like slick packaging, reminding us that a book is much more than just a vessel. As a blog, Riverbend soars. As a book, it clatters around like nuts and bolts.

Juan Cole elaborates upon the differences between blogging and the mainstream media (MSM), underscoring the danger of a Murdoch move into that sphere (see just posted: “blog on a leash“).
“…we are independent actors, not part of a small set of multi-billion dollar corporations. The difference is that we are not under the constraints of making a 15% profit. The difference is that we are a distributed information system, whereas MSM is like a set of stand-alone mainframes. The difference is that we can say what we damn well please.”
and later..
“Blogs operate in a different political economy than does mainstream media. Bloggers’ “editors” are the readers and the Daily Kos and Eschaton commentators who use collective intelligence to improve them. Their motive is not the profit motive for the most part. Most bloggers are hobbyists.”
People sneer at blogs as amateur, as just the “demos” blowing off steam. But what’s a democracy without the demos? That “collective intelligence” is what one hopes for in a truly participatory democracy. Independent voices. In conversation. It seems inevitable that some blogs will become commercialized, or will leash themselves to mainstream media. The cover story in the latest issue of Business Week focuses on how “blogs will change your business.” But these moves will not be about the collective intelligence Juan Cole is talking about.
I’ve also been thinking lately about blogs as a learning tool. Writing for an audience, whether in the dozens or in the thousands, helps hone writing and thinking. Let’s discuss this further..

How much longer will print newspapers be around? Earlier this month, in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Rupert Murdoch gave a shockingly clear-eyed appraisal of print journalism in the digital age, calling for an end to complacency in the face of “a revolution in the way young people are accessing news.”
“They don’t want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel. Instead, they want their news on demand, when it works for them. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it.”
Murdoch clearly understands the forces at work and is keen to adapt in times of change. Print is still important, he says, but less so by the day. We should not take for granted that the traditional broadsheet will still be in use even one generation from now. We must focus on improving the way news is presented on the web. He talks about the inevitable shift to web advertising, hybrid forms for web content combining text and video (simply a merging of two of his empires), and bringing blogs into the news apparatus.
It is this last point about blogs that made me wary… especially in terms of the “control over the media” that he articulates in the quote above. The founder of Fox News understands that control can go two ways… Control can be construed simply as more choice for the viewer – more formats, more frequency, but also the power to choose the kind of spin, or presumed shared values that come with your news. This has been the success of Fox, with its trademark blend of hard news and hyper-politicized slant. But Fox is billed as serious news and is relied on by millions as a primary source of information. How much are they thinking about that as a choice? Here we get into control of a different kind. It’s not hard to imagine a few key blogs getting hitched up to a newspaper as a sort of web-based O’Reilly Factor or Hannity and Colmes. Many newspapers are already experimenting with bringing blogs into the fold, but there’s still a fairly clear line between news and commentary. What if blogs, or something descended from blogs, became the news?
Everyone is wondering where the blog phenomenon might lead. Is it a transitional medium that will eventually lose steam? Or will blogs get co-opted by big media and join the spectacle of punditry that so dominates television and radio? Say what you will about bloggers today – that they are hacks, windbags, amateurs – but it’s hard to argue that they aren’t independent, that they don’t function in their own sphere. What’s been so impressive is how they’ve expanded the domain of the op-ed and letters-to-the-editor pages, actually emphasizing the line between opinion and news. Blogs can break stories too, and often act as a corrective to the mainstream media. But take away professional reporting altogether and you remove the foil that defines their existence. There’s a new kind of media diversity coming into being on the web: new kinds of journalism, the evolution of an in-between class of citizen journalists, and of course, blogs. How does one weave it all together to form a view of the world? Murdoch seems to have some ideas. What’s scary is that he might be dreaming of a world in which all news comes in a sort of bloggish wrapping – the Foxification of web news.
Other useful reading on the uncertain future of newspapers:
– “Abandoning the News” – report from the Carnegie Corporation about news-reading habits of 18 to 34-year-olds
– good comment on the Carnegie report
– good post on PressThink: “Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die”
– from the Economist: “Yesterday’s Papers”
– from American Journalism Review: “Reversing the Slide” – on the Washington Post’s efforts to counter a recent sharp decline in circulation

The blogosphere population has topped 8 million!
see PubSub tracking