Response to Anil Dash

This is a response to Anil Dash who responded to my "Blog It" post on my LiveJournal. I'm responding via Blog It to highlight a Blog It problem: dispersal of commenting.

Hi Anil,

Why am I concerned about the future of Six Apart?

It's a landscape issue. I have questions about where "blogging" is going generally. The novelty has worn off. There are a few bloggers that linger because they made an early market impression but there has been no real turn over of celebrity that was expected early on.

Citizen Journalism is a bust, it needs to be fed constantly by surprise events in the world and there are just not enough of them. Most News needs to be constantly crafted to sustain the public interest. Credit goes to the mainstream media who have embraced blogging and now own it. Blogging did have an impact upon how the mainstream has evolved.

The public is tired of smart-ass, self-indulgent and irratic bloggers. It takes a professional commitment to sustain a consistent blog. Facebook is a more useful self-publishing tool for most people. It gives them things to do together.

Further, the functionality of Typepad / Moveable Type / LJ / Wordpress / Blogger has not evolved into anything interesting or more useful. Wordpress has stolen the MT/Typepad thunder. It's hard for me to justify maintaining my Typepad subscription given how easy the functionality is to replicate (even if I ignored Wordpress and coded it from scratch).

I think that technology is a dead end for all concerned. Something more interesting is required for people that want to use the web as a more powerful publishing platform - to do the things that you can't do with traditional documents. Six Apart was positioned to provide leadership for the web as a platform for software as a service in publishing but it looks to me like you missed the boat.

With respect,
Steven