vox, not so much
I don't vox so much these days.
Blame it on the new blogsphere bloggersphere.
If the old blogOsphere was about RSS and elevating a single voice, then the new blogsphere bloggersphere might be about that too, but more about the embracing of constraints, which is maybehow a literary form grows up.
The new forms of the bloggersphere are the tumblelog (see project.ioni.st) and twitter. New to the craze? Think (HTML) stream-of-consciousness and (text/i message) social poetry, respectively.
Herein lies the Paradox of Choice and what Mena Trott has been saying all along, now made Mathematical! by Y.T. in the form of EdgeRank, that blogging in the small is a-ok.
(And after all, really, it's the blogger, not the blog that really makes the blog*sphere go round.)
While I still futz with the algorithmic analysis of the thing, the academics amongst you should re-read Granovetter's "Strength of weak ties" but not spend too much debating, if such a bias exists, the biopsychosocialization of our oh-so-gendered society, into those who seek strong ties and those who mostly seek strength instead through the growth of weaker ties.
If you still don't get tumblelogs, let me tell you this. The constraints: IMG, video EMBED, BLOCKQUOTE, and A HREF -- images, videos, quotes, and links, no more. Tumblr makes it easy to share -- you highlight something to cite (not quite transclude), click "tumbl" and you're almost almost done.
If you still don't get twitter, let me tell you this. The constraints: 140 characters. Content, what are you doing? Want to message someone publicly? "@tony they're grrrreat!"
How is this taking off when Dodgeball tried (and then just happened to escape from enterprise-y corporate Googoo land) and Loopt still trickles on? Constraint is liberating, but as with many things, Mathematical!ness lies in the median way. Too much constraint -- publish only your location and you lack perchance the freedom to "perform". Too little constraint and you have a gallery of voxen, all but updated once or twice and then forgotten.
danah might be right in that today's youth don't generally expect privacy to exist as the older generation might. But today we have Facebook and Google, not yearbooks and yellow pages, and also spiders, data centres, and the unwashed mass compute, not quite subject to the laws of human biophysics.
Do "we" not exist if we don't twitter, tweet, or tumbelog? I don't know, but I'm glad to embrace the "new", the simpler, constrained, and your-small-circle way of this new bloggersphere.
