The future of blogging

Imagine a full extension of property rights and a closing off of the "commons" problems known as the comments section of a blog.  Marc Andreessen writes:

The first time I met Dave Sifry,
over three years ago, he told me that conversations on the Internet
would eventually all revolve around every individual having a blog,
each individual posting her own thoughts on her own blog, and blogs
cross-linking through mechanisms like trackbacks and blog search
engines (such as Dave’s Technorati).

The advantage of this new world, said Dave, is that each individual
(anonymous or not) would be publicly responsible for their own content
and in charge of their own space — substantially reducing the risk of
spam and trolls — and the communication would flow through the links.
There would still be the risk of link spam, but at least this new world
would make people more responsible for their own content, and that
would tend to uplevel the discourse.

But how will readers know which blogs and which comments to visit?  I fear that tagging (and related acts of evaluation) is an underprovided public good.  How can we compensate effective taggers for their efforts?  And do you not enjoy the weaving back and forth of discussion in a single blog thread?

My prediction of the future equilibrium is…the current equilibrium, like it or not.

Here is an article on the future of search.

While we’re at it, I’ll repeat the norms of this blog: it’s fine to be humorous, but don’t treat the other commenters, or for that matter bloggers, in an insulting manner.

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