Worried that Google’s acquisition of Blogger is a bad omen for the world of weblogging, Mark Anderson at the American Sentimentalist launches a salvo calling for new thinking among his fellow webloggers. Even though it is still a draft, Mark’s well thought out manifesto lays out a strategy for maintaining a blogosphere independent of corporate media: First, realize the danger corporate blogging could pose. Second, beginning to form communities of cooperating webloggers. Third, replicate the institutions of civil society.

I. I am not a demographic. In the midst of my most recent site redecoration binge, I decided (with some encouragement from Plasticbag.org) that it might be time to include some personal info on my front page. What troubled me was what to include. I’m certain I’ve provided enough personal info to allow anyone to follow the trail of bread crumbs to find out my secret identity, but I still don’t want to broadcast it. Perhaps it’s just detritus from my church work days, when I kept to separate spheres–church and non-church–so I wouldn’t have to worry about privacy. Or maybe it’s my being sentimental about the secret weblogging identities of Locke and Demosthenes in Orson Scott Card’s Ender series. Maybe I’m afraid of spam. But for whatever reason, I don’t want to use my name, and I don’t have to.

Atomization of the individual is the Market’s™ feeding ground. We are each sifted and sorted into our appropriate demographics: age/sex/education/orientation/marital/income/etc. In the Market™ what I buy determines who I am, and an ethic of consumer choice keeps us all in line. (No one makes you buy anything, so you only have yourself to blame.)

But weblogs are already a move beyond that. The currency of the web–the hyperlink–already counters atomization with network. Ping sites like weblogs.com help bloggers find one another. Comment features foster conversations inside of blogs; trackback fosters conversation between blogs. Sites like blogrolling.com and blogstreet.com help bloggers map out overlapping, personalized neighborhoods. And sites like technorati, popdex, and daypop help us see who is connected to who and where the action is.

II. So weblogs are already cooperative and communal. But not yet communal enough. With some kind help from Rebecca Blood, I set out last week to find webrings of like-minded bloggers. No luck. Except for xanga.com, I found no blogrings for my fellow Unitarian Universalists. And, less surprisingly, I found no blogrings for other recovering philosophy majors interested in post-structuralism and ideology mapping. (Shocking, eh?) I know that they’re out there; I’ve seen traces here and there. But nearly all the blogrings I found were divided according to demographics.

But assume some someones take pity on my blogringless state and create three or four blogrings just for me. We still have no easy way to collaborate or, often, even know when others have updated. I know, I could just go here, and do that, and set up this other thing over here. But until it’s easy, it’s not going to happen on any meaningful scale.

Sites like TopicExchange may be pointing the way. But even then, I have to find TopicExchange, learn how to add myself to the appropriate categories, and check back to see if others have posted.

Community-written weblogs are fine. But what we really need is some new software to better facilitate cooperation. You shouldn’t have to set up an entirely new blog in order to collaborate. What we need is something that would go on top of our weblogs, some sort of meta-weblog where I could opt in to some sort of meta-blog with you and three others here, and opt into another meta-blog over here with some other folks. Then one click from my homepage shows anyone the community meta-blog we create together from our individual posts. Perhaps something along the lines of SevenDegrees? (Is this the correct name?)

III. Replicate which civil society? The atomization of civil society happens through the experience of mass media, through TV sets and remote controls, through video games, through films where we don’t ever see the cast and crew face to face, music where we never see the musicians. But pre-mass media civic spaces may not be appropriate for us–and we probably can’t return to them anyway. Instead of merely replicating civil society as we see it, shouldn’t we fashion new forms of civil society? Weblogging will foster its own forms of civic space, spaces that will rival more traditional forms and even rival each other for attention and influence. Now we just need to make it happen.