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Late to the Blog Party

Some might say I've come late to the Blog Party; I'd say I'm fashionably late. But, it is true that much of the good stuff has already been talked about. Just as with my attempt to summarize the history and import of the blogging subculture in its journalistic value, I've discovered that months earlier, the PressThink blog wrote

What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism? with an interesting discussion in comments below, spanning the full range of opinion. I couldn't have covered the angles better, myself.

Included is a comment from Seth Finkelstein, whose own blog takes on the Dean Bubble implosion, and the self-delusion of one former Howard Dean Campaign Manager Joe Trippi.

Now Seth's site looks a lot like this one-- because neither of us have revamped the MoveableType standard templates. And his writing on politics in the age of the Internet mirrors my own thinking: media hype and the loveaffair (appropriate or not) with all thing online created the appearance of greater support for Dean than was actually on the ground.

Is it elitist to suggest that vast majority of Americans-- including those who are otherwise smart and in positions of power-- still don't get the Net?

Blogs on RSS, baby!

Blogging for a new tomorrow

If you're like me— and I know you are, because why else are you reading this— you like sampling the buffet of information available on the Net, but don't like having to pick through the dated Web sites offerings of limp lettuce and cold General Tsao's chicken to get to the fresh Kung Pao. You want your morsels of knowledge and entertainment, fresh, packaged and ready to eat.

And that's why Weblogs (aka blogs) are— as a certain pointy-eared alien would say— fascinating.

In their infancy, blogs were little more than what's new pages, barely a step up from the days of fingering someone's UNIX account to get his .plan (You old-school command-liners know what I'm talking about.) Blogs developed in lockstep with the Web. It was a natural outgrowth of ye olde Homepage, where well-meaning early Web authors would put up pictures of their nieces and kittens. We're talking the Web Stone Age circa 1998 AD.

Jorn Barger is credited with coming up with the term "weblog" in December of 1997, but it wasn't until 1999,Peter Merholz coined the diminutive "blog" and the name took hold. Blogger.com jumped into the fray, offering free hosting for personal journals.

Eventually, some bright software developers hit on ways of making online journal entries easier to create than having to hand-code Web pages. The earliest such efforts were for computer mavens, who wanted others to keep abreast of their activities, and often listed links and bits of news from other sites on the Web.

Former MTV VJ and now technopreneur Adam Curry was one of the first well-known Web journal writers. I almost used the word "journalists" but it's not quite that: bloggers have no compunction about appearing partial. Online writings may be irreverent, informative or downright bizarre— and draw a mixed reaction from traditional journalism. The old-school news is both repelled and drawn to the phenomenon. Some hail blogging as the second coming of the written word. Salon's Scott Rosenberg was less gung-ho in Much Ado About Blogging

But since being anointed the new killer app, blogs have taken a definite turn towards becoming the New Self-Published Medium, just as the Web was promised to be, but never quite made. Instead of trying to recreating the whole experience of newspapers, being responsible for design and content— as print media attempted (like, say, the Washington Post, New York Times and your local rag)— blogs offer individuals with an opinion a quick, painless and relatively non-technical means to write to their heart's content. Granted, most blogs are started up with a flurry of activity, then gradually fall into disuse. The recent Perseus Blog Survey estimated that there were over 4 million blogs created on the eight top blogging services, but that 66% had no postings for over 60 days. The Perseus Study also claims the typical blogs were created by teenage girls, using it for a sort of online versions of Passing Notes in Class.

But a growing number of bloggers, from all over the world, are producing writing par excellent; creating content that is timely, important... and above all, being read by untold numbers of people.

Blogs, Blogs, Everywhere

2003 was the breakout year for blogs. Google bought Blogger, and added it to its stable of not-yet-profitable online enterprises. It was the year of Salam Pax, the Baghdad Blogger (who got a book deal); of Wil "I'm not Wesley" Wheaton, the Ex-Child-Star Blogger (who got a book deal); and of Julie Powell, the former Long Island secretary obsessed with Julia Childs Blogger (who got a book deal.)

And it was the year of "Blog for America -- the online political powerhouse that's going to put Howard Dean's name onto the list of Presidential almost-rans.

RSS is in the hizzy

While things were cruising along nicely in Blogville, down the road came RSS: the Rich Site Summary or RTD Site Summary, and sometimes also called Really Simple Syndication. RSS (and its derivatives, like Atom) do for blogging what up to now, the Web itself was unable to, successfully: consolidate content into easy-to-digest portions. No more checking bookmarks, seeing if a site has changed, loading up pages and trying to figure out just how old the ramblings you're reading are.

RSS-enabled sites can be downloaded to a variety of software, where you get headlines, summaries and even full text without having to fire up Internet Exploiter. With an RSS client, you can create subscriptions of blogs, including categories and frequency of updates, based on your own preferences. Eventually, expect to see a convergence of Web browsers and RSS readers, but for now, the two work hand-in-hand.

To read more, check out Mike Shea's excellent page on RSS and newsfeeds.