Social Story-telling
Websites were awesome, but soon they faded out in terms of creating excitement — thanks to the boring static pages. Blogging democratized and cheapened — in terms of cost, not value — the process of creating content. But people’s attention-span reduced even further and micro-blogging evolved as a concept. Micro-blogging — in my opinion — actually cheapened the value of content, as prioritization of content took a backseat [See my related post on Social Postage]. Ingenious content contended for the same mind-space as the minutia and trivia people had started broadcasting (what I ate for dinner, color/shape of my poop etc…).
After micro-blogging, the most imaginative concept that evolved in creation of online audience was live-blogging — where people did one of the two things (a) they live-reported events as they took place (Apple WWDC or the Egypt uprising as example) (b) they reported events that took place several years/decades ago (World War II as an example). Live-blogging kept the consistency of blogging and provides the instant-feel of micro-blogging.
Almost as in a penny-drop, I have (re-)discovered reading. I am reading awesome and inspiring stuff — on various things. So far the logical thing for me to do has been to write a review on the books, which are part-review and part-reflections. What I would like to do someday — when I have audience for it — is to extend live-blogging to book-reading. We don’t have time to read all books — what better to way to share insights from books as we read it? I am very excited about this and would like to hear what you think.