This is my last post.

Don't freak out. I wouldn't for a second think about stopping "blogging", after all it's in my job description. Seriously. Blogging, despite its awful name, is a critical way to connect with a network of peers beyond the physical, sharing ideas, promoting the work I do, and exploring the boundaries of what I know in a real and open way. So what do I mean when I say this is my last post? Well, maybe I'm starting to just now realize how much the medium is becoming the message. I guess I'm starting to wonder why writing for the web has to look so much like the traditional 5 paragraph essay. It seems to me we could do better than simply embedding multimedia in a post and calling it progressive. But as much as I love Wordpress, the technology is informing the content. I need a canvas, not a camera. So I'm rebooting. This stuff will all be archived somewhere else so I don't feel the necessity to somehow port the existing work to a new system. But what will that system look like? I have a few ideas....

The End of Reverse Chronology

When you read a post of mine it's probably because you followed a link. And if you happen to be on the homepage you don't exactly care about which stuff I wrote is the most recent. I don't feel like a reverse chronological list of posts is all that useful today. ### Provocative thoughts shouldn't require a 5 paragraph essay

One of the reasons I love Twitter (and one of the same reasons I hate it) is the 140 character limit. There's no reason someone should feel like they can't write something that consists of one or two sentences and that perhaps that might have value. And why can't that happen on a "blog"? What if instead of writing a post I recorded audio and uploaded it. In its current form here I'd feel uncomfortable making that a post, but why is that? ### Interactivity

I'm not talking about embedding a storify into a post and calling it a day. This site is a part of the fabric of the web, which happens to be an amazing thing with so much possibility. But you'd be hard-pressed to recognize any of that in these posts I write. Text certainly has value, but I think there are also some intriguing ways at getting an idea across without handing a wall of text to your followers. I'm being a bit vague here but I've got a few ideas and I want to make this a sandbox for some of the creative things we can do on the web rather than just a static mouthpiece about those creative things. ### Embedding Ideas

In 2013 it's never been easier to embed video, audio, tweets, so much interesting stuff from around the web. And yet if I'm talking about your blog the best I can do is probably a link. The link is fine, hell that's what makes it a web after all. But I want to believe there are ways for me to include your voice as a primary piece of a larger idea I frame here without doing it the disservice of a simple link. I need to think more about what that looks like though. ### Sharing

RSS is not dead, it's incredibly important (at least until something better comes along). But there are a lot of ways people consume and share ideas and that's looking less and less like a traditional RSS reader. I don't want that to be a lame list of social media icons at the bottom of the page either. How can I make it easier for people consuming content on this site to share that with others in meaningful ways? So I've got lots of ideas, plenty of questions, and very few determined goals. But one thing is for sure, whatever this thing is going to be, it looks less and less like WordPress. So this is my last post. I wanted to scratch out some ideas I had about what a blog could be. And I'm interested in yours as well.

Tim Owens

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