Talking to a brick wall...
Rants & Raves
Blogs and the Personal Internet
See, I've commented before on my sadness about the fact that, well, the internet corporate boom (and who knows what else) killed all those nifty personal geocities (et al) sites we used to see back in the mid-90s. Around 2000 or so, I was very much afraid that the 'useful internet' had wiped out the 'personal internet'.
Right now, it's very obvious that that has not happened at all. The hidden culprit behind the death of all those personal sites may very well have been the blog itself. In any case, the weblog is the evolution of the personal site. Even those few of us that have a bit more to share with the rest of the world than a standard blog allows for seem to be incorporating weblogs into our personal sites, or at least maintaining both mechanisms.
If you ask me, this is a Good Thing. I've been critical of blogs in the past, but right now I am realizing that they are the new democracy of the internet. What was great about those geocities pages was that just about anyone could put them up--the blog has only further reduced the barriers to entry.
There is still the argument that, for any given person, 99% of all blog entries are ither redundant or useless. If you think about it, though, the same can be said of conversation in general--we all say about the same things to each other. What's important there, as well as here, is that we have access to those conversations that are closest to us. And, (this is an interesting tangent,) we have the added benefit of logging and recording global (or at least national) conversation over time, much more thoroughly and completely than before.
The blog only helps, as far as that goes. They are distrubuted conversation made as easy as typing and clicking. And, as history and technology have shown more than once, any world in which communication is easier is a word better lived in.
- An Article to Think On
- Evolution in Publishing
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I know this has never actually happened, but you can actually use the image above to go over to the forum, where you can think and chew on this article in the form of a discussion. Just letting you know :)
As for links, I guess I should at least point you to my blog, which recently got an overhaul.
If I do this any time again in the near future, I promise to give you a plastic-esque flood of tangents for your perusal. Really.
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