Too much to read. The other day, when Will Richardson picked up on David Weinberger's public announcement of overload and exhaustion, I recalled a few things on that theme. But first, of course, I identified with it. Some weeks it's all I can do to find time to think and write, without reading the work of others -- knowing very well that reading fills the well we draw from when we think and write.

So I seem to recall Dave Winer's attitude about the huge number of blogs one might like to keep up with: that if something important comes up in a blog he's not tracking, he doesn't worry, because somebody will comment on it and eventually the idea will make its way to a blog he does read. Perhaps there is some truth in that.

Still, it's not an entirely comfortable approach. For one thing, part of what we come to value in blogging is the sense of community, and as David Weinberger's post points out, not reading the work of one's community members feels like a betrayal. Can the community survive, or be real in the first place, if people don't have time to read each other? So there is some question whether blogging can be, or can remain, what we think it is.

Then there is the academic or professional custom of keeping up with one's field. If you are a professional, you expect to read the leading work in your field, to process it, to use it, to comment on it. Once you've subscribed to a couple of hundred blogs, it doesn't take long to become swamped. The ideal of professionalism starts to seem out of reach, unless the profession itself creates a way to screen content for its members. Heaven forbid that bloggers reinvent the academic journal with its panel of referees.

So I start to get the impression that we are left with the writer who sometimes manages to engage a community and at other times recedes into a solitary work space with less extensive contact with others. With new tools being invented every month, it's risky to assume that this is our final cirsumstance, but it may be. And it may not be only a loss.

I recall that Jonathan Swift reacted three centuries ago to what felt like a glut of publishing in his strange little piece called A Tale of A Tub -- I suspect that one of the essential traits of literacy is abundance or overabuncance. It is a problem, or maybe a whole series of problems, but if it is also an essential trait of the work we're doing, then we need to keep thinking about how to approach it.

It's not hard to find the earliest bloggers recalling a time when they knew everyone who was blogging, but that day passed. Now, and really for some time now, the most energetic educational bloggers can no longer read all the work of their edublogging colleagues. As we encounter the abundance or overabundance, do we satirize the excesses, as Swift did? Do we trust that good ideas will survive and find their way, as Winer says he does? Do we create software or collaborative practices that help focus our shared work in some way that resists the problem of overabundance? Do we accept the literacy's bounty as a blessing, as the wide landscape that can provide room for newcomers and new communities?

When you go to a conference, you get a chance to focus on, and help focus, the new work of your field. We may be able to look at other successful institutions, like the academic conference, for clues to help us respond as a group to the overwhelming abundance we face. (As individuals, we are probably bound to fail, yes?) I have commented occasionally on the custom of food bloggers to share a topic one day a month -- their distrubuted blogging events -- called Is My Blog Burning? -- focus their work and produce small anthologies (whose chapters are in the various blogs) on a particular topic. They've created an institution that suits their purposes, that plays to the strengths of bloggers and their software, and that they enjoy. We might be able to create a focusing practice that is suited to our work, too. If we can, then the essential bounty of literacy might no longer seem so alarming, so overwhelming. [0 & P]