A little over two year ago I wrote a short piece,”The Trouble with Blogs”. In it I said:
“Now I don’t know if this is just me, but the problem I see with the blog as a form is that the focus is always on the latest entries. There is little to encourage you to explore the site as a whole. I know if I arrive at a blog and there hasn’t been a new entry for a while, I tend to move on somewhere else. Of course, with some blogs this makes sense, their focus is very much on the current, on what’s happening now. But with others, this makes less sense. Something they talked about three months ago, or a year ago, or even longer may be equally as interesting as something they are talking about today. So I guess the question I end with is how could a blog look more like a web than a diary?”
I had been prompted to write that by reading Grant McCracken’s blog, of which as I said at the time:
“Grant McCracken is on a roll, scattering ideas and insights in his wake. I have linked to him before when I pointed to a piece by him on welcoming difference and another on modern identity. But thinking about some of his more recent entries, highlighted for me what seems to be a problem with the blog as a form. McCracken’s site is rich in ideas and things to think about.”
I was reminded of this entry by remembering some stuff McCracken had written about creativity, in particular, a piece called, “Creativity and a tennis ball”. I’ve put in a taster below. Well worth a read and maybe, if you find it as interesting as I did, it will encourage you to explore some of his back catalogue and then with that as an exemplar to do the same on some other blogs. You can start that process here:
“Back to the tennis ball. I don’t know which one of us found it and first kicked it. But the moment it emerged from the rough grass of the hotel lawn, it was “in play.” The world had changed in a very little but very distinct way. And the other two players accepted the new presupposition of our interaction and “fell into” the game. No one much cared when they did well or badly. The official idea was to move the ball forward at something like at a pedestrian pace. The unofficial idea was ‘to see what happened” and to be party to this little act of chaos. I remember being struck that there was no hesitation to engage in the game or to continue playing it, despite the fact that we did it badly.. And I think this must be one of the characteristics of creativity, especially group creativity, and most especially of group creativity dedicated to thinking about dynamic phenomena. It is dynamism about dynamism. It is, in a phrase, spontaneous, selfless, tentative, reflexive, propositional, experimental, constantly forming, and utterly open source.”