Dina picks up on Dave's excellent post and brings in a wide range of thought about how we can make blogging more human.
Behind their thinking is the emerging idea of "presence". In the real world, turning up is important energetically. We feel a new person's energy when they enter a room. In a meeting when someone reads from a script, or worse his power point slides, his presence drops as does the power of his message. When a person speaks while making full eye contact and while connecting to themselves, we experience presence and hence power. The question is - how do we create this type of presence in blogging?
As a start for me it would be nice if I knew that you were also at this very moment online. The IM idea. Secondly I would like to see you and experience the full visual bandwidth. I want to see the animation of your face when you talk. Talking free over long distance would be great. I would like to build on ideas with a others so maybe a wiki would be a good idea as well.
In short I would like to have a technology that would shrink the world. Where I can experience all but full contact presence with my friends who I can find in a global context and not be limited to my immediate 20 mile radius of my local world.
This doesn't sound like a hugely difficult technical hurdle to jump. All the parts are available. I think that the blog is the best starting point as it is easier to deal with than a wiki based front end. I now have an Apple which makes Skyping impossible but iChat is a powerful tool that has nearly all of the features of presence that I think that we are talking about
