Colin Walker (discussing a purported “text renaissance”) loops back to an earlier discussion about Dave Winer being dissatisfied with blogging. This is back when I made the observation that for all intents and purposes what Winer is doing these days is disavowing the blog and writing a bletter instead—by which I meant drafting his daily newsletter in real-time and in public.
Which certainly makes perfectly good sense given the history of how his blog came about in the first place.
When you consider that Winer’s blog evolved from his DaveNet email list it’s easy to see why he might want to return to that mode of delivery for the best experience. From a more mainstream perspective, it would likely involve, as Winer hints, redeveloping the subscription/delivery mechanism that is currently served by RSS.
The thing is, he can already do what he wants with RSS, especially given that he works entirely with home-grown tools: he just needs to code his blogging platform to not update his RSS feed until the end of the day, and that update would be just a single RSS item containing all of his writing for that day.
By all means experiment with forms and methods during this “text renaissance”, but there’s not actually anything especially wrong with blogging as a form and a format.
Make something new, that’s fine. It can even be an offshoot of the blogging form. But one crotchety guy’s dissatisfaction with how blogging serves him doesn’t mean blogging somehow has to be fixed, or that whatever he or anyone else might come up with must need redefine what we consider to be blogging.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to write a bletter. You just don’t have to declare that blogging, or RSS, is broken in order to do it.