I have read much a little too lately about personality conflicts among those interested in the ownership and openness of some of the applications which support authors publishing thoughts like these on the web. Usually I do not concern myself with such things any more than I get involved with the personalities of people who improve the additives in the gasoline going into my car's fuel tank. One recent thread on what is described by the authors of the site as an otherwise quiet blog, however, caught my attention and drew me in to make a couple of postings.

As the authors of Poochkiss point out, the most interesting thing is not about the particular personalities involved. For Poochkiss, it is how the thread evolved as a discourse. For me, it is that the discourse is at all important. As I have indicated, I see the idea that this site and others like it are something fundamentally new is historically incorrect. There may be better bells and whistles and ergonomically correct content management systems but, as you can see from long standing sites like Stallman's, the need to change lock step with those bells and whistles is truly optional.

In light of this, I am struck by the interest in the important personalities of personal web publishing - as opposed to their works - and stated so on the thread at Poochkiss. In helpful response posing that this was inevitable, I was directed to an essay on the propensity for people to respond to informational complexities by seeking and relying upon a limited reliable range of information sources. Through compounded reliance on common indexing rather than ones own browser favorites, these sources become generally standardized and the promise of diversity of public thought becomes lost.

My point? I want to overcome my own complacency and look for new ideas from new sources. Perhaps due to the dominance of Lord Goog, one mid-90's web habit has fallen by my wayside - stepping from link to link to link randomly in a level of amazement to find out a new small part of what is out there. I am going to brush off the dust of that habit.