A few months ago I discovered that Slate, a web magazine with revolving ownership (Microsoft, Washington Post), had RSS feeds available. Being a nerd, I signed on to suss out the quality of the writing. I remembered finding a few gems in the past on Slate, particularly from Steven Johnson, and I was curious if they still ran the good stuff. Well, good news, they do.
Today I came across a post on the press box column by Jack Shafer entitled, Blog Overkill, The danger of hyping a good thing into the ground. Shafer writes after attending the Blogging, Journalism & Credibility conference at Harvard and within a larger historical context of new media, new media evangelists and the underwhelming revolutions they so zealfully herald. His point: the true believers of new technologies oversell their impact and that "new media technologies almost never replace old media technologies, they merely force old technologies to adapt and find new ways to connect with their audiences."
This is good stuff that starts to cut through some of the aggregate bumpf of the bloggy world (named 'The Blogosphere by the in crowd) to find some clarity on the real issues at play here. My own point of view is that blogs need to be re-estimated. A blog is nothing but a web page built with a free or cheap, lightweight, content management system that by default creates new content items in reverse chronological order and allows additions to the content items by anonymous users. The blog content management systems have all kinds of skookum automated features built in that allow blog writers to distribute their work widely and optimize their sites to be found, particularly by the finders of the web, search engines. So the promise of personal publishing heralded since the beginnings of the web is made simple and inexpensive, in a standardized format. This is why there has been such a sharp uptake of blogging. The tools became easy enough, accessible enough and cheap enough that anyone could use them.
According to the Pew Internet Life Project, probably the best source for great information and statistics on Internet trends and use, report The State of Blogging:
People don't care about blogs, they care about stories and good writing and compelling voices that speak to them in a conversational format that they can participate in. On the internet and in life. The blog is just the technology that enables the behaviour.
Posted by James Sherrett at January 28, 2005 05:36 PMThat is the troof, bra.
Posted by: Craig at January 28, 2005 06:27 PMYou're mostly right, and though I evangelize blogs when I speak about them, I remind my audience that it's a tool. In that context, it's a tool that does one thing well (much better than a static website): increase your site's readership. There are lots of technical and practical reasons as to how this works, but there's no doubt about that fact.
More philosophically, the weblog is the embodiment of a lot of emerging concepts. The Cluetrain Manifesto (http://www.cluetrain.com) taught us that "markets are conversations". The Catheral and the Bazaar (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/) taught us--in a pretty technical way--that many voices are preferable to few. Sundry other essays and books have predicted the many-to-many revolution, and blogs have come to best represent that. Why?
* They've lowered the barrier to publishing. Blogging is as easy as sending an email.
* They're a highly networked medium, enabling like minds to find each other easily.
* They encourage dialogue, as opposed to monologue.
In short, they democratize the Internet. Blogs are a tool, yes, but they're also an important enabling technology.
Posted by: Darren at January 28, 2005 06:29 PM