Aug. 12 began as a hot morning in Aylesford, Kent, England, only to be followed by a powerful thunderstorm in the afternoon. Meanwhile, the blackberries were beginning to redden. Aug. 12, 1938, that is. The observations were made by George Orwell, whose copious diaries are now being published every day in blog form, exactly 70 years after they were made.
When Pam Spaulding heard from two contributors to her blog, Pam’s House Blend, that they couldn’t afford to attend the Democratic National Convention, she knew that historic times called for creative measures.
The third annual WordCamp San Francisco was held this past weekend, bringing together WordPress users and developers to discuss the past, present and future of their favorite Web publishing platform. Since its humble beginnings as a fork of the b2\cafelog blog software in 2003, WordPress has grown to become one of the most popular blog publishing platforms.
Another weekend means another bitchmeme, and this weekend it was all about FriendFeed. Scoble has a good summary of the debate so I won’t rehash it all, but I did want to throw something into the mix:
Ultimately it’s all about the user.
The echo chamber of the blogosphere is concerned about too much refactored content and a lack of original thought in the raging river of blog posts flowing into feed readers and Web crawlers (see Techmeme). There are many worse problems in the world than what is sometimes unpleasantly called blogorrhea. You could be a blogger in China dancing around government censorship. Internet and Web 2.0 technologies have allowed anyone to be a writer, publisher, and pundit just by clicking the publish button. Along with the flood of interesting and insightful content comes the boring and feckless.
Is blogging just the end result of someone’s input into a content management system? Of course it is. So what? You could point a URL to a daily post in a discussion forum. It would have far better interactivity than a blog, and would be just as easy to post as often as the author would like. Does that make the output purely a forum post?
When I first used the microblogging platform Twitter–which enables users to publish 140-character-long messages via the Web and mobile phones–I thought it was silly. Or rather, the uses to which it was being put were silly: people announcing that they’d just woken up or what they’d had for breakfast. I couldn’t have cared less. But then I should confess that when I first used blogs and podcasts, I didn’t fully comprehend their impact either. So, when my son and Webmaster told me I should take another stab at Twitter, I did. And I now see it is an important evolutionary step in the rise of blogging.
The prototypical computer whiz of popular imagination–pasty, geeky, male–has failed to live up to his reputation. Research shows that among the youngest Internet users, the primary creators of Web content (blogs, graphics, photographs, Web sites) are not misfits resembling the Lone Gunmen of “The X Files.” On the contrary, the cyberpioneers of the moment are digitally effusive teenage girls.
When I started blogging four and a half years ago, there was a clear delineation between bloggers and journalists. But that’s all changed, and now we have this new category, the journablogger.
The journablogger has his or her own blog or works in a blog network like paidContent, TechCrunch, Gigaom, Silicon Alley Insider, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, VentureBeat, etc., etc. Just look at the top of Techmeme’s leaderboard and you’ll see them right next to the traditional journalists like the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNET, etc.
The traditional path of a journalism career has clearly shifted. In the past, a journalism student would learn about being a newspaper reporter, then take a job at a small-town paper, eventually moving up to a medium and then larger paper. Now, the reporter might launch a blog, an audio podcast or video reports as a one-person operation, handling editorial and business duties simultaneously.
Web-site outages have never been more public. When a site or service goes down, companies are using blogs to rapidly update their users about what happened and why. The inevitable finger-pointing takes place in real time, and within a matter of minutes, a server failure can generate a headline on TechCrunch or Valleywag. This creates a challenge for Web hosts and data-center providers whose business is built upon a reputation for reliability. In this fast-moving environment, how do you balance the need to be accountable to customers and also work to mitigate headline risk?
The most compelling image we’ve seen out of CES to date: Bill Gates sitting down for a one-on-one interview with Engadget editor Ryan Block. What’s compelling? The fact that Bill Gates granted an interview with a blog–and that it’s not considered news.
I left Salon last summer with the idea of working on a new book. I’m happy to report that the book now has a deal and a publisher–Crown, with whom I had such a happy experience on “Dreaming in Code”–and I’ll be spending the next year or so researching and writing it.
I am, I think the word is, stoked.
The topic will seem obvious to any of you who’ve been reading my stuff over the years: It’s going to be a book about bloggers and blogging. The working title is SAY EVERYTHING, and we’re describing it as the story of how blogging began, what it’s becoming, and what it means for our culture.
In 2002, blogging evangelist Dave Winer made a long bet with New York Times executive Martin Nisenholtz: “In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times’ Web site.” Today, Associated Press editors and news directors chose the top 10 news stories of the year, which makes it possible to determine who won the bet.
Dec. 15, 2000. That’s when I started blogging. In seven years a lot has happened. The first two years of my blog have disappeared. They might be on a hard drive somewhere, I’m still trying to track them down. Dave Winer first linked to me on Dec. 29 (sent me about 3,000 people, if I remember my stats right). The term “weblog” is 10 years old on Monday. So lots of blogging birthdays.
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