Here's an interesting discussion of blogging (and research into blogging), and whether the metaphor is holding it back.
This obviously isn't the first time the question of metaphors has risen up in relation to new technologies. My favorite discussion is in The Art of Human Computer Interface Design, in an essay by Alan Kay. Kay is my personal hero, and this year hit the trifecta of major awards, receiving the Turing Award, the Draper Prize and the Kyoto Prize for his contributions to the field of computing. But I digress. His point in the article is that we adopt metaphors because they are super helpful for novices to build a mental model of the artifacts they use online by relating them to real-world equivalents. The problem is that the whole point of doing something online vs. in the real world is to escape the constraints inherent in the real world, and by relying so heavily on metaphors we inevitably place conceptual boundaries on our online artifacts. Kay talks about this in terms of files and folders, and how real-world and online filing (and searching) schemes are fundamentally different simply because in the electronic world there is no physical limit to the number of documents you can put in a folder -- though there is still a physical limit to our ability to flip through the files in a folder that being online doesn't change.
Hypertext is another great example: links don't exist in the real world. Our notion of real-world documents is such that if I want to refer to something that someone else wrote, I need to assume that it won't be readily accessible and so I'd better summarize the main points. Online, we assume the opposite: that the referred-to document is available, and that the reader is encouraged to digress and go check it out. That fundamentally changes the rules of composition, a shift that we still haven't found our comfort zone with. This has huge implications for blogging and online journalism.
Kay suggests that rather than think in terms of metaphors, we would be better served thinking about "illusion" -- the point is to convince the user that the environment they are working within is internally consistent, predictable, and follows their intuition.
Bruce Tognazzini took it a step further, in a paper published at the Interchi '93 conference in Amsterdam. He makes the case that the leading thinking in this direction is actually stage magic. Magicians are highly adept at making us believe that things that are physically impossible actually happen. Tognazzini lays out several of the principles of how magicians do this in their own field, and how it applies to computer system design. This is one of my all-time favorite papers, and I was fortunate enough to see Tog present it on-stage in Amsterdam at the conference -- with demonstrations of a few of his favorite magic tricks.
As an aside, I always worry when these kinds of discussions take their inevitable turn toward media analysis and get lost in "McLuhanisms." To wit (from the comments on the original post):
"Metaphors are transformative agents rather than comparative agents."
"The internal diary of the self can be visual, verbal, or musical."
"But it is a comparametric perspective that assists the process of transformation: either by perception, or by analysis by machine that stimulates the nervous system into comparison of what makes one perception similar or disimilar."
"Functionality is key to self configuration"
McLuhan was a smart guy. He was also smart enough to realize that some people took him way too seriously -- a point which comes out clearly in The Medium is the Massage if you read between the lines. And more to the point, people actually thought that they could build a formal and complete understanding of media; when in fact since all of our information about media is delivered through media, our perceptions and understanding are always imperfect.
McLuhan, were he still alive today, would have a field day with people who blog about blogging, or create wikis about wikis. Or who create YASNS linking all the people who work on YASNS. It isn't about the artifacts; it's about how people use them to make their lives better.
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