There is virtually no technology involved in the construction of blogs that wasn't available in 1997. But somehow people tried to all build their own (perpetually-under-construction) home pages and got overwhelmed. Services like Geocities emerged to help you do this. And it was pretty much a total loss.
Blogs emerged, popularly, about a year or two ago. I wasn't sure why it they were prominent now, but I was pretty sure that it WASN'T a delayed reaction to the drop in prominence of Usenet? or the rise of Google.
Scoble disagrees. When we talked at lunch, he suggested that his own particiaption in Usenet had dropped to nothing when he created a blog. Usenet wasn't good at status: there was no way to tell the sheer coolness of a Scoble post from a noisy post by someone else. And when you wanted to disregard someone, it was extra work. The group could ban someone--but you either needed the group to agree on it; or you needed to have your own killfile.
In contrast, a blog means that you can Follow Scoble's Words (or whoever your a-list bloggers are)--and, if you dislike them, you can ignore them by dropping his RSS feed. You choose your set of authorities, and follow them. And authorities know that they have their fixed set of followers.
He also believes that Google means that you can now post something, and let the world find it. Yes, that worked on the newsgroups: but that meant an extra click or two off of the default page. Blogs are a way of making sure your voice is heard by the world, and that it's your own controlled territory.
March 30, 2004 10:07 AM | TrackBack | in Microsoft Social Computing