Two interesting articles from Ben Hammersley and Tom Coates, both in The Guardian. "Second Sight" has Tom explaining that we should not shy away from the oncoming hordes of new bloggers from Yahoo and AOL. Instead we should improve our tools and work out how to keep finding the wheat in the chaff.
Extended version of the comment I left on Plasticbag.org — I think that it is an interesting article, I think it is important to deal with the oncoming situation rather than sit wishing it would go away.
Ensuring that people's voices are heard against the power curve is an interesting challenge and aspires to create loosely connected and communicating networks of people. Each group of people has different members and hopefully the non-overlapping edges of these circles amount to enough churn to stop the insular nature of the in-group. We all operate in our wells of 150 of people, weblogging is a way of at least hearing other narratives, even if you never meet the actual people, you can at least see the world from their point of view.
It is a kind of low-level pattern matching AI that is needed, trying to classify all of this woud be madness. The tools are out there, but rudimentary. the various aggregators and filters, all allow us to create a unique picture of the web for ourselves. Finding interesting ways to allow persistant rich communication that does not exclude people from participating is probably going to involve modifying how email works, Brent Simmons has been thinking out loud about RSS and email. He links though to an article by Chuq Von Rospach on the same topic and looking at mailing lists. Chuq used to run several mailing lists I've been on and he knows his stuff.
Ben Hammersley writes about RSS and newsreaders, giving a great overview of why RSS rocks and how it is putting control of finding what you want from the web into your hands. Quite introductory stuff, but a great grounding in explaining it to other people.
Taking all of this together points to a user controlled collaborative future which gives us richer communties to join in with and hopefully will bring some of the richness of mailig lists, with the presistance of web communities and the personality of weblogs. Maybe kind of like the Pattie Maes personal agents.
