"The Web is growing older, and its authoring tools seem increasingly unsatisfactory to larger numbers..."

“The Web is growing older, and its authoring tools seem increasingly unsatisfactory to larger numbers of people. Much of the writing on the early Web was short, ephemeral, weightless. Bloggers would write about where they went, who they saw, what they ate. Content creation tools evolved to support brevity, with Twitter and Facebook as the logical end point for that style of expression. In contrast, entrepreneurs like Winer, ­Williams, and Brown are building tools for reflective thought. They expect their users to contemplate, revise, collaborate—in short, to work more the way writers historically have written, and as the pioneers of the digital revolution expected people to continue to write. What all these new tools for thought must prove is that there are enough people willing to give up the quick pleasures of the tweet or Facebook post and return to the hard business of writing whole paragraphs that are themselves part of a larger structure of argument.”

- Paul Ford reviews a variety of new composition tools in Technology Review, and muses about their common cause: http://bit.ly/H1ECWh (via jasonashlock)