Various shades of blog
Last November in Barcelona at the W3C Mobile Web Initiative workshop I posed a question of Web authoring. I noted that it was easy to author in the early days of the Web. A simple text editor was all you needed. Today we find that authoring is a complex activity, frequently requiring the assistance of specialised tools. Authoring for the mobile Web is going to be considerably harder, unless you have access to some good content transformation solutions. So will the mobile Web be dominated by readers? Will anybody be able to write?
Johan Hjelm from Ericsson pointed out that mobile blogging could be the answer. The blog server provides the framework and the authors provide the raw content. Simple.
As someone who used blogging software to keep personal notes, this seemed like a reasonable answer. I found blogging easy to do. But subsequently I planned to move my private blogging into the public domain, and it’s obvious that blogging privately is a completely different activity. When blogging privately you don’t have to explain everything. Even this simple entry took a lot longer than the equivalent private blog version.
Just remember why it’s called the “Web”. All those links. Without the links you have no Web. Authoring for the Web is not just about raw content. It’s about context, and the links establish the context.
For comparison, here’s how this entry would have looked as a private note:
Moblogging might be an authoring solution (ref: Johan at MWI Nov04) but raw blogs lack linking. This threatens the nature of the Web. Needs a good (i.e. easy) link authoring solution.
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