A little silly to blog about blogs, but it’s just that I was struck the other day by the realisation that the blog is a really interesting written format. Sometimes a writing format is discovered/invented and it changes the way people write. The novel did that. It fostered the development of social satire and transformed the place of fiction in our society. I’m not sure that the blog is on par with the novel as a writing form. But it’s definitely got some similarities. Like the novel it’s very flexible, a small number of simple rules define it (the novel has chapters, the blog has posts and comments). Also, like the novel it is being used in a broad range of writings. By contrast, think of the sonnet, which is primarily used for romantic poetry. Blogs get used for all sorts of writing: news and current opinions, creative writing, diaries, education. I’m guessing that it won’t be many generations (maybe even the latest one) before, as with the novel, it becomes hard to imagine what the world was like without that format available.