We’re slowly standardizing them for size and style and once they’re ready they’ll be posted here. Oh, and they’re free! And here’re two examples:

So, Dixon-Spain.com was launched and development done on an ad hoc basis. For 12 months that was fine. The site tickled along, and as more information became available on the net, references and summaries were added to the site. All well and good.

And then the genealogy research got a little more in depth, and the demands on the WP install became a little more onerous: particularly the need to display more than one line. How to accommodate this in one blog? Well, there was the TNG plugin, which is not really a proper integration, levering an external MySQL / PHP app. into the WP framework. That wasn’t a route which fitted well with our core aim: to do it all with WP. Then we looked at what we had available to install on our Bluehost server, and joy of joys, Buddypress presented itself. Actually we were more excited by the presence of the underlying WPMU architecture.

So we designed a theme off the back of the delightful twitterish Tworrder, installed 7 or 8 relevant plugins and constructed a useable environment for Genealogists with WP expertise. At the moment it is not in any way perfect, but given the use of pages for people, and the blog for research updates, it fulfills the brief in a ‘janky’ kinda way.

Moreover, as we develop it and develop our research we’re going to refine the family tree fit, and hopefully the site will become used by more families than ours. And the name? Our Illustrious Family! because all families are illustrious … of course.

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And accessing patient records would be a (very secure) breeze. It would work like this: everyone gets a personal website from the day they were born, where all their details are stored, and they’re the only people who can log on and see everything (once they’d reached their majority of course). There would be some things that the person can edit, like their address, personal preferences and relationships, and others that the professionals involved could edit, either with the consent of the individual, or in the case of, say a diagnosis or prescription, without it. Pages would only be viewable with the patient’s consent, and would be protected by the highest level of encryption available at that time.

Then of course all of the data would be held centrally, and be accessible to the patient anywhere in the world where there’s a PC with a browser capable of the required level of encryption. Imagine that, go to Turkey and find that if you get blood poisoning the medics there would be able to view your records and see what medication you are currently on. Big plus. You could granularise the access too: maybe we’d have publically available medical profiles for emergencies — which the patient could choose what to display.

So of course there are security issues, with huge levels of complexity about who can access what, and how access codes are securely distributed, but frankly if we wanted to future-proof the thing, well, shoving it in to a vast online database would do the trick. Maybe it wouldn’t be absolutely secure, but what government facility has ever been secure? I know that is not really an argument, but I am sure present levels of encryption would be good enough.

But then you take it further, perhaps each person should have a webpage which includes their education record, their criminal record, their income tax … everything. How would that be? A recipe for disaster or a way in which each individual can keep track of their affairs, and maybe have more control over them — imagine for example having a live readout on your credit rating by logging onto your personal webpage.

I come back to the original idea tho’ — they should have used the net, surely?

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The great effect of blogs has been to universalise the creation of webpages, to allow the common-or-garden user to make their mark on the internet. The logical development of the blog is the microblog and the social network, both of which have made the publication of these thoughts, links, pictures and connections easier again. The trade-off is between creating a clear online identity which can market your brand, your product or yourself, and swimming as part of a shoal in a more anonymous, transient mode, albeit one that may make meaningful connections between people easier.

In this light it is interesting to explore the way that WordPress – the leading open source blogging platform – has adapted and been adapted to incorporate these new forms of web-expression. The most notable and extraordinary development has been the BuddyPress project led by Andy Peatling. This converts a vanilla installation of the Multi-user version of WordPress into a reasonably fully-featured social network. Its success can be measured in the amount of spam sign-ups the software is already generating even on test installations. Is this supercharged modification an implicit acknowledgement that Blogs are on the way out? Perhaps. But then you can also use a WordPress installation as a shop (ScottishLaird.com), a members’-only website (PerfectPresenting.com), a corporate brochure (TheSportsConsultancy.com), a Group Blog or Community Newsite (ForArgyll.com), an online aggregating application etc etc. The blog doesn’t remain a blog for long it seems, but becomes the lead endeavour among many others. And in pinpointing this, it becomes clear that the form’s longevity depends upon this interaction with time and narrative, and how attractive to the user this remains. I think it will, afterall how many diarists pre-1999 were instantly published like this?

And then there are the other integrations which augment and support the older model, like posting to Facebook, or tweeting your posts to twitter (like this blog does), or using your flickr account as your picture library (I’ve used this one to great effect on ForArgyll.com) or aggregating a relevant youtube channel or … Well, you get the idea.

I’ve been running an experiment for a while at charlescharliecharles.com using a plugin called WP-o-matic: I aggregate all my online prose pieces* into one blog, which link directly back to the source post. (I could have done this with chi.mp, but I discovered it too late). ccc.com been going now for eight months, and its allowing me to see both the common threads in all my online endeavours and also the places where it ain’t working. It also means I tweet from this aggregate blog, and therefore create a vibrant and ever-changing thread which is always backed up with reasonably in-depth content, which in turn is publicising my work through the newer networks. In short, my blogs are getting more traffic from exactly the source which has killed off the long tail.

So Charles is right. Both of us. The Blog is Dead, Long Live the Blog!

* and yes, I do have a poetry blog which for reasons we need not rehearse here I keep separate

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