I think Nick [Denton] is eager to declare this a post-blog design as a sop to advertisers. It’s still a blog, it’s just the blog is in a narrower column.
- Anil Dash, cited by Nick Bilton in Gawker Hopes to Transform “The Blog”
Denton IS on to something, though, and Anil is missing the forest for the trees. Yes, the new Gawker will still be incorporating some of the mechanical elements of blogs, so in his eyes it’s still the same old, same old.
But Denton is moving into a era where blogging’s tools and tenor have been ingested and digested by big media, but the social dimension has not been. If anything, his new foray into New Gawker will make his property grossly less social, less involved in community, less us and more them.
That’s what he is on to. He is joining the big media companies who are hoping to stripmall the social web, to become part of the sprawl.
I have argued long and hard about the need for something like the New Urbanism Movement, so we can save the best aspects of social media before it is all razed to make way for media malls. I call this New Spatialism.
Denton is going with the other guys, who are dominated by dreams of scale and control.
I am dreaming of the next stage of the social revolution, one that continues to emerge from our connections and conversations, where we have a stake and a say, not just a ticket to sit in the audience with a box of popcorn in our lap.
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