Once upon a time last October, Robert Sharl wrote a blog entry in which, quoting Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, the way you do, he talked about the breaking down of the differences between the roles of producers and consumers.

I have been interested in, and concerned about, the nature of identity in virtual arenas such as SL for some time now. My interest bubbled to the surface again last week when I responded to an entry in Bryan Alexander’s blog Infocult called Towards Third Life.

Several Web sites are now providing free online editing tools, nurturing a new generation of filmmakers.

I have just added the structured blogging plug-in to this site. It is available from StructuredBlogging and I am in two minds about it, even before I have used it. The idea is impeccable and important, but it feels as though the crew may be preparing to abandon ship.

On Sunday evening I got my first chance to look inside the Structured Blogging plug-in, and so I started to poke around. In this kind of situation my technique is usually task-based. In this case the process was made easy because there were at least three features that I really did want to change from the moment I installed the plug-in.

Having spent some time evaluating the Structured Blogging plug-in, and discussing it at length with students, I have become less and less certain that what it offers is worth the price. At first sight the ideas behind it, and its implementation, are impressive and thought-provoking. The fact, however, is that in fifteen months the plug-in has signally failed to set the world on fire.

These statistics about Web 2.0 participation have implications for citizen media, too. Are we truly erasing the barriers between citizen and media, or are we just replacing one set of gatekeepers with another?