No, I'm not heralding the end of blogs (and neither—I don't think—was Baldur Bjarnason when he coined the phrase meme in 2003) any more than Roland Barthes was heralding the end to individual authorship hinted at (in quite different phrases and tones) in both the original Esquire article on Wikipedia recently submited for wikification and the wiki-edited version thereof. Please! I just started mine and I still need time to play with it.

But in Monday's Textuality class, a fellow student brought up the possibility that the immediate and pointed nature of hypertext perhaps makes its author's intention more capable of being pinned down than that of a non-hypertext author. It was an interesting point, even though the focus of Barthes' academic-meme-initiating essay was on the idea that "a text is made of multiple writings" that come together in the act of reading rather than in the act of writing—not the (also important) idea that an author's intentionality is too difficult to determine to be a worthwhile point of literary study.

But the logical conclusion of my classmate's point would have been that web writing brings the focus back to the person of the writer, so I had to point out the emphasis of web 2.0 content—textual or otherwise—on interest and, more importantly, usefulness to the reader/user…to the point that the multiple writings/apps of the web not only come together in the experience of reading/using but are altered from their original state by the reader/user. (Man, there needs to be a single word for that…re-user?)

rollyo logo

Then, as if posted from the ether to make me feel good about my point of view, into my bloglines popped a boing boing post about rollyo, the candy-named DIY-er's dream come true with a childhood-snack-evoking logo. Rollyo subverts even the authors of the web app to end all web apps: search.