The trouble with blogs and a possible solution

"I have met lots of people who have been persuaded by books but I have never met anyone who has been persuaded by a blog."

That remark was made to me about a year ago by a good libertarian friend. It's pretty stinging. It hurts because firstly, I believe that the internet is the obvious place to try to persuade people of the merits of libertarianism and that blogs are (so far) the best way of getting thoughts across and, secondly, because it is true.

Blogs don't persuade. At least not yet they don't. They don't persuade (I think) because the typical blog posting is not deep enough. It doesn't get to the ideological heart of the matter.

Of course, persuasion is a two-way street: you need people who are open-minded, people who want to be persuaded. My guess is that that is a pretty small number, say 1-2% of the population, but even so they matter. They are the people you have to get to.

But if you can get to them you want to persuade them of the ideological case. If there are a lot of convinced libertarians out there, people who are convinced of the general case then you don't (typically) have to persuade them about the specific cases.

The other day I was thinking about writing a blog posting about James Sherwood's remarks on railway closures. But rather than just write another blog posting I wrote down all the separate statements I could make and then listed all the things I could in turn say about those statements (the sub-statements so to speak). I counted 23 statements and sub-statements ranging from core libertarian principles to how one might deal with CO2 pollution. I am pretty sure there are a whole bunch of other things I could say but 23 is quite enough for now.

The problem is that to do justice to all these 23 statements would take an age by which time the original remarks would long cease to have been current.

And, when I've published this posting, people might take an interest in it for a couple of days and then it dies. OK, there may be some committed souls out there beavering away in the archives but generally speaking it just gets forgotten.

And that is why, by and large, blog postings tend only to scratch the surface. Doing anything else just isn't worth the candle.

But what if you could do things differently? What if you could write a separate blog posting for each of these statements and then tie them all together in one posting which would mainly comprise links? OK, it doesn't change the length of time involved - actually it might increase it - but what it would give you would be a whole bunch of statements that could be reused, perhaps in a similar context, but perhaps, also, in quite different contexts at a later stage. That would be useful. If you ground out enough of these you might even succeed in having written down all your thoughts. You might even be able to take a news item and be able to write a blog posting about it using entirely archived statements. My guess is that that would be a lot easier and a lot more effective in the battle of ideas. In the long run that is.

Of course, things are never quite so simple. When I looked at these 23 statements I realised that were many that I would have difficulty in justifying. But maybe that is not so bad. At least you've stated what you believe. At least you know where the gaps are. And you never know, ideological friends might just help you fill those gaps.

But what if your views change, or you want to change the wording, or new information becomes available? Actually, I think this is where the internet and blog management systems come into their own. For minor changes you can add post scripts. New facts, new arguments, even new ways of putting things can all be accommodated this way. For major changes you can create an entirely new blog posting call it Version 2.0 and add a link to the original posting.

I have already had a couple of goes at this. One was in an article about child safety seats and the other was in an article about LA's underground. I think they went pretty well and I would like to take the experiment further and see if I can make it work for, well, everything. In this respect, having a specialist blog ie Transport Blog, is, I feel, a huge advantage, because the number of possible statements is, at least, limited. Obviously, if there are any readers out there who can assist me in this task I would very much appreciate it.

However, before I embark on what would be quite a radical departure from current practice I would like to ask readers what they think. Is there something I have missed? Are there gaps in my reasoning? I won't deny it, I am apprehensive and if there any show stoppers out there I would rather know now than later.

Update 08/05/04

It occurs to me that maybe I don't have to change everything over to this new format. Maybe, if I just do it for the things that get said again and again and again that would be just fine. At least this way I reduce the risk of screwing things up.