Metablog

Explaining Blogs (cont)

Seems to me that this is a case of Tim Bray's Laws of Conversation. So, I question how well Joshua explained it to them.

Overall, I think the best analogy is a diary, except that it is in the most public of forums: the Internet. And, I think most non-technical people would understand that analogy. A diary written in another media can become a blog: see The Diary of Samuel Pepys.

Joshua's blog (and many others) also tend to be topic-specific (political, in his case; sports in some of my favorites). Those need a slightly better explanation, but once the diary analogy is understood, I think you can extrapolate the extra meaning inherent in the topic-specific nature.

There can also be commentary and interaction by complete strangers with your blog. I think that's an incredible shift in communication dynamics that make it more powerful than a conversation with just yourself that no one will ever read.

Perhaps one reason that a lot of open-source folks (who already have the technical wherewithal to make it all work) take blogging to heart - we're already used to having our technical discussions in public - so why not extend that to other aspects? See Planet Apache for a collection of Apache-centric developers and their blogs. (Just put on-line a few days ago.)

(If I could figure out how to get href's in a comment correctly, this would have been a comment. Oh, well; perhaps it is worth its own entry anyway.)

Posted by jerenkra at January 15, 2004 02:46 PM