Toronto–Microblogs. No, not infectious diseases and virology.

Blogging copy is just too long. Forget the writing–who has time to read all that stuff? As Mr. Jobs put it:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is… the whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

There is no great loss here. Humans didn’t read for fifty thousand years. Then we used it for simple ideas and storage, so everyone didn’t have to remember everything. And then we had books, huge books, that nobody wanted to read or, at least, felt they should.

We are at the cusp of the next liberation: not from illiteracy, but from its boring excesses.

So now we have microblogs–snippets of ideas, links, and news that can be easy consumed (and stored, if you wish) in vast quantities.

Evan Williams knows something about this (or, at least, he guessed right). He started Blogger.com in the late 1990s. But last year, he made Twitter. We have Jaiku, Tumblr and Pownce. And my favourite, Soup. Each of them saving literacy’s wonders from the short and agitating experiments in Big Books forced on the innocent.

(Big Books are good and useful–but we’re talking consent here. Not the intellectual humiliation that hides in the bookshelf shadows beside each unfinished copy of A Brief History of Time)

Soup is the best in microblogging. The EVERYONE home page connects every user’s input in a thick wave of images, videos, languages. Right now we’ve got an American girl’s maybe-wedding gowns jammed between a Chinese-language coffeeshop review and someone’s Google Screenlet - and it scrolls down with you, between and beside and underneath it all.

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Posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 7:18 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.