Both Gary Santoro and Jeffrey Zeldman are lamenting a web that didn't turn out the way they'd expected ...

"... A second Renaissance, every person an inventor and publisher. Magazines, communities, visual experiments. New narrative forms. Interactive jam sessions. In-depth explorations of every imaginable topic, from Leadbelly discographies to single parent self-help resources. This we envisioned. This we soldiered for. And what did we get?

Blogs, Gmail, and Friendster."

What's curious is that I'm finding huge hitcounts on all those keywords, renaissance in all directions multiplying faster than Google can count them, albeit in fairly narrow domains, but certainly all of those cited topics from Ledbetter on down. Ok, it's maybe not everyone who's suddenly and inventor and an artist, but I can find composer workshopping, visual artists, 3rd world development projects, Thai farmers selling coffee, genome science and intersteller plasma physics, diesel maintenance and waste-water filtration conferencing, literary and historical discussions, beermaking and rug-hooking ...

only I'm completely unable to find any of that in either the blogs or the Friendsters.

Hunting Dark Matter

At first glance, that seems to me frustrating, depressing, like why should those oh so promising technologies of inter-related 'social network' collaborative discussion gear, so effective within the software fold, why should they be so completely left out of every party except their own ... but on reading Jeff's Saddest Song post, I thought again -- perhaps in Gary and Jeff's observation of the void they perceive in the general webspace, maybe there's a candle's glow here: If they could not find the Ledbetter discographies and the flowering of, for example, John Cage commentaries or trad bands booking their own continental tour dates, then do you think maybe just maybe I'm just not seeing the tangibly useful side of blogdom?

Like, maybe it is out there, somewhere, the practical blog, the usefully human RSS, out there but unperceived, like Dark Matter, masked by the noise of superstellars and their nebular planetoid minority, an undiscovered and undetectable great majority share of the dreams stuff is made of, only completely invisible unless you know just how to read the signs, tantilizingly not-quite-evident in a direct gaze, knowable only by its effects.

Or perhaps it's not occult in the least, it's lurking just beyond the boxed realm of the blogrolls I can follow in a day, just below my patience mark digging down pages in the feedsters, maybe even dead-obvious to some and just dis-synchronistically only on the dark side of my moon, dangled there just beyond my blind bluff digital fingertip's fumbling.

It could be, ya never know. The web is a pretty big place, bigger by the hour, and the best thing you could hope to say about it with any degree of truth is the only statis around here is the incessancy of flow.