* Illustration: Mark Matcho * There may already be a coherent narrative of blogging buried somewhere among the billions of posts out there. But probably not. Fortunately, Salon cofounder Scott Rosenberg has created one with his new book,* Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters*. For a year and a half, while millions of people cranked away on WordPress, TypePad, and Blogger, Rosenberg researched the roots and ramifications of the phenomenon, including its colorful and cranky practitioners (himself among them). The result is the antithesis of a blog post—tens of thousands of words with nary a link, composed not for pageviews but for posterity. We tracked back with him about the medium's future and probed his personal blogroll.
__Wired: __ Here's something I bet a lot of people ask: If blogs are so great, why did you have to write a book?
Rosenberg: It's an inevitable question, but it's illogical. When Greil Marcus writes a book about Bob Dylan, do you say to him, "Why'd you write a book? You should have written a song."
__Wired: __ Has blogging already peaked?
Rosenberg: There's still growth in people going online, so there will continue to be new bloggers all over the world. But in terms of media excitement, it certainly has peaked. The weird thing is that blogging is considered old hat in Silicon Valley—but the cultural establishment, the journalism business, and other important institutions are still saying that blogs will destroy civilization.
__Wired: __ Even now?
Rosenberg: Doris Lessing said it in her Nobel lecture. Meanwhile, many high- profile bloggers are very provocative in their own stance. It leads to this downward spiral of rhetoric.
__Wired: __ What impact has Twitter had on blogging?
Rosenberg: There have always been two types of blog posts: brief incidental blurts—really short one-line things, quick links—and more substantial statements. Twitter has taken that brief, blurting blogging and put it to rest. That pushes blogs toward a tradition of real writing.
__Wired: __ So what will blogging look like in 2019?
Rosenberg: The form is so useful, so simple, and so open to people who want to use it that interesting blogs 10 years from now will look surprisingly like they do today. I wouldn't be surprised if Boing Boing is still doing its thing very similarly 10 years from now.
__Wired: __ What about the effect of higher bandwidth, mobile devices, and cheap video?
Rosenberg: The interesting outgrowth will be lifecasting. With traditional blogs, even if it's easier to put stuff into a blog, you're still selecting items. Lifecasting is an alternative where you're pressing a button and recording everything. But it's very hard to have an interesting life 24/7. I spent enough years as a theater critic watching Samuel Beckett to believe that.
__Wired: __ You insist that the golden age of blogging is not past. So if new and interesting blogs turn up every day, name some that will blow our minds.
Rosenberg: The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks (unnecessaryquotes.com) is in the book already, but one example of a passionate pursuit turned into a hilarious blog is Cake Wrecks (cakewrecks.blogspot.com). Another kind of obsession is lastplanetojakarta.com, in which John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats geeks out about death metal music, which is nothing like the music he plays himself. And there's thehousenextdooronline.com. I don't know anything about these people, but they do high-quality arts journalism.
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