This is a good discussion of the phenomena of weblogs/PWPs, care of Rob1 (via right).
[I'll have to think about this given the stats and relative adoption rates compared to ham radio.]
Later: I congratulate Rob1.
This is the best statement of where weblogs are today that I have read. It does not backaway from either the overriding hobby aspect as well as its placement on a continuum that reaches at least into the early 90's as opposed to a new phenomena created by current players.
I am interested in the co-mingling of weblogs and open source and how idea sharing - especially outside of the realms of technology and science - can facilitate the expansion of the uncommoditized world. I remain unsure of the point of aggregation other than that we now can as I see them as a buffer to meaning and community rather than a tool for these. The noise is too great, the opportunity to receive too limited to go beyond superficiality.
I am suspicious of anything calling itself a "tipping point" as I have gone though too many "paradigm shifts" which were little more than a consultant creating a new word. Also, it is not structurally democratic external to itself, given the digital divide(s), however much participants believe themselves a new democractic thing - too much great man theory for that.
I am looking for the unified tool of RSS - not my interests but all interests indexed, an eBay of ideas where I can find any interest discussed in increatingly detailed sub-groups of further detail - a usenet without active participation drawing on content from feeds from open source platform blogs made available to everyone. Is that there yet? It is too much to ask for?
Later Later: The author, Andrew2, is now linked right.
Comments
Alan - October 31, 2003 4:11 pm
Is my dream what Jason K. is describing?
Alan - October 31, 2003 9:03 pm
It is close:<blockquote class="smalltext">Moreover also wanted to add weblogs into the mix. In collaboration with Pyra, they built NewsBlogger. Newsblogger had two basic features: 1) search for news and then 2) blog it. When you look at the heavy use of RSS and what the most popular topics are in weblog land, it's not hard to imagine how Newsblogger, if it had developed into a proper application, would have been used heavily (the post-9/11 warbloggers would have used the hell out of something like this). Readers become writers. Moreover also wanted to start scraping weblogs and adding that content to their news feeds. News becomes conversations. Really interesting stuff, stuff that's happening right now with political campaign weblogs, professional micropublishing, RSS, and weblog search efforts (Lafayette Project, Technorati, Daypop, etc.).</blockquote>But what is needed is taking the keyword capability and playing it not against topics of the day, the news, so much as the Dewey decimal system - only the scale and the analogy is wrong. The tools exist to create the card catalogue of the whole damn web.<p>Think of a wikipedia which is filled not by hobbyists loading in their opinions but by automated RSS searches hunting for content by keyword, the results filed according to a stanard recognized classification system. It would be Google cut open and exposed, classified with a table of contents at the front and index at the end. The ordered internet. That's all I want. Sounds like a good open source project.