worldwide pablo: Birth of the blue

An interesting and auspicious trend unfurled its leading local edge today at a newly launched Oregon website, Blue Oregon, where various local bloggers are holding court together as "a place for progressive Oregonians to gather 'round the water cooler and share news, commentary, and gossip." Regular followers of Orblogs will recognize nearly all of the faces represented there, ranging from Allegedly Retired Jack Bog to WWP amigo Jason Evans, among nearly two dozen others.

Blue Oregon is lively and varied reading, a breadth of local voices only hinted at before with such existing sites as Alas a Blog. Like another more established and well-followed Oregon blogger, though, WWP wonders if this trend to omni-blogging is an inevitable future. Can it be, a la Star Trek: The Next Generation, that "resistance is futile"? [Come to think of it, "blog" seems suspiciously close to "borg," now that you mention it.]

Time was that blogging was a personal, individual, iconoclastic and sometimes insurrectionist act. Indeed, the name weblogging itself invokes the very ideal of a personal act: diary-keeping [although admittedly one done in the very most public of ways]. Blogging defiantly began as a "boutique" expression, after all, set apart from the blandness that inevitably results whenever writers have gathered, only to be followed by editors, then publishers, then managers, then ... well, you get the idea.

If sites like Blue Oregon are a trend, a portent of what blogs are to be, one wonders: Is this actually blogging, or is it a mutation of website publishing as we once knew it? Or is it an evolution of something in-between? What's the difference, say, between it and Slate? Or Orblogs? Or an RSS feed? Will the salon approach simply compete with the blog regular -- or replace it? Has blogging gone Main Street? [Or worse, metaphorically speaking, to the mall?]

Coloring the discussion is the reality that except for a handful of sites, blog fatigue appears to be setting in and spreading, perhaps explaining in part an urge to merge. [WWP relates.] What's more, WWP tends to think, such grouping corresponds nicely with today's convenience-prone, "have it your way" world that many yearn for, even in the blogosphere: a "one-stop" blog, as it were, with neither the inconvenience of configuring nor the rigors of reading an aggregator [to say nothing of minding a myriad sites manually].

However one slices it, Blue Oregon is an accomplishment to marvel at, and WWP salutes friends and fellow bloggers therein. There's a link over on the right side of this page under "Our Daily Blogs." WWP plans to use it every day. And he'll keep blogging, at windmills, per usual.

At least at long as there an appetite for it.