Despite the fact that the headline directly contradicts what Greg is talking about in this article, this is exactly the kind of thing I’d throw into a nice little sideblog there on the side of this here enterprise – Greg Storey’s Airbag hopefully predicts 2005 will kick off the Bronze Age of Web Design.
I don’t know if that’s necessarily true, or not, but his thoughts there directly tie into a new Miscellany essay I just posted over at geoffreylong.com, “On Middlepublishing”. The idea here is still sort of nebulous, but there’s a lot of chatter in the channel lately about the advantages of people playing an editorial role in the creation of webzines and acting as cultural filters. My thought in the essay is that the notion of “micropublishing” has been thoroughly co-opted by weblogging, and therefore the existence of sites like Inkblots, where one person (or a crew of people, in our next incarnation) is responsible for the editorial responsibility of collecting and presenting the best stuff they’ve found lately. This is nothing new – zines have always claimed this as their charter – but I’m kicking around the idea of what it would take to create an engine for that particular feature, and a bazaar for middlepublishers to browse for new talent.
These are the things I think about when I’m not working or playing World of WarCraft or doing Christmas Cards or working on my novel or applying to grad school… Maybe my first resolution for 2005 should be simplify.
Update! It took a little while, but as of Super Bowl Sunday 2005, the sideblog has been added, as well as a host of other little features. Success!