The design shiftswith blogs looking more like magazines, and magazines looking more like blogsaren't just superficial. These changes in presentation are collapsing all distinctions between "blog posts" and "articles." Over the last few days I contacted various bloggers and editors at big sites around the Web to ask how they define each term. The answers I got were surprisingly diversewhile each of these organizations has its own rules for what it calls a "blog post" and an "article," the rules aren't at all consistent across newsrooms. What's more, the lines are blurringblog posts are looking more like articles, and articles are looking more like blog posts.
Further thoughts over at Chloe Veltman's place.
I've thought of the Dish as a blogazine for quite a while now. The model we've groped our way toward combines the agility of a pond-skater with the ability to deep dive at any moment. And its reader-generated content makes it a product of a collective mind as well as an individual one, a bull-session as well as an individual's thinking out loud. Who knew this evolution was possible even a year or two ago?
And I have to say, our new "read on" feature has helped us evolve this more quickly and intuitively than I thought it would.
See?
You get the choice to skim or dive in - at your leisure, and with minimal hassle. Then the links help you explore even more, if your nose takes you there. So the Dish becomes as much a mediator as an individual thinker, as much a collective mind as a single one, as much a biased broadcast as a communal debate. With videos, art, quotes, thoughts, provocations, jokes, and photography thrown in for good measure - some prompted by you, some by me, some by Patrick, Chris, Conor and Zoe. And all, in the end, channeled through what's left of my fried frontal cortex. That's much more than this blog was in, say, 2002.
But that's the joy of this new medium. We still don't know where it will go next. And we're all improvising like mad. What's not to love?