I came across this lovely headline yesterday:"El sueño de Internet es que cualquiera puede ser la CNN, pero eso, al final de cuentas, es mentira" ("the dream of internet is that anybody can be the CNN, at the end of the day though, this is a lie" - despite this, the voice of the article goes on to list the some of the successes of personal publishing on the web). The question here though is: who wants to be the CNN?

I sometimes visualise the blogger as a character out of a nineteenth century novel (most likely something by Maupassant or Turgenev), sitting by the fireplace chatting about what s/he has read in an (electronic) gazette. Often equated as a threat, a competitor of professional journalists, the blogger, in my opinion, is closer to the figure of the editor (although trends are also evolving in the direction of "real-life" reporting, but that's the subject for another post).

I write these considerations both as a blogger, and as someone who has paid his bills working as a journalist and as an editor. As someone who is keenly aware of the mutations that occur when an activity is transposed from one medium to another.

The idea for grid blogging came into being as a way of exploring potential new structures of communication and conversation implict in the rise of "We Media". Abe put it nicely: "sort of like taking a hyperdimensional slice of blog space and turning it into a distributed magazine". The special issue magazine, is a good analogy and a decent relative.

Grid blogging also subverts the "impulse-writing" of the blog post by setting a publication date. A way, if you like, of contrasting the unrelenting flow of information, by dedicating time to thought and elaboration. Which brings us back to the CNN quote. Mass media, especially in the format of TV news, ploughs on regardless of understanding or the creation of connections between events. Cluster media, on the other hand, could help draw connections, assist understanding. In short, grid blogging is a humble exploration of new ways of producing selecting delivering news. Tactics for contaminating commentary.This is simply one of the many attempts to understand the way our voice will sound, the language we will speak across the mediasphere of this infant century.