Sometimes I mean to write something and then while I’m procrastinating somebody goes ahead and writes it for me (only usually much better than I could.) Such it is with Virginia Postrel who tried to explain weblogs to Alex Beam. Postrel writes,
Others [weblogs] are a more civilized version of online discussion groups. Because each person has his or her own site, the reader who wants to follow the discussion does not have to read stupid flamers or irrelevant comments. You can read the blogs you know to be interesting and ignore the rest. Or if there’s a discussion of a topic you find uninteresting, you can ignore it. I don’t know if you subscribe to any listserve discussion groups, but the signal-to-noise ratio is much lower than with blogs — for the simple reason that it’s easy to tune out blogs you don’t find valuable.
Yes, yes, a million times yes. I’ve been thinking along the same lines because of something I read on the Wired web site back in the day (i.e. 1996 or so). At that time, of course, the web was much younger and an enormous percentage of Internet users were posting to Usenet on a regular basis.
At which point someone Wired suggested that people ditch Usenet for the web. Instead of posting articles and replies in a newsgroup, why not just put up a web page? Then someone could write a reply and put it on their web site, etc.
I’ll admit it — at the time I thought this was stupid. It would require easy-to-use tools to post to the web, a large community of users, and regular (even daily) updates. Yeah, who was ever going to go to all that trouble!!
And here we are in 2002 and that’s pretty much exactly what we have with all of these people starting weblogs.
Of course when people were just posting pictures of their cats, the journalistic line was “look at all of these people doing such frivolous things.” Now that people are writing about politics and culture and even the journalists themselves, the line is “who the hell do they think they are?”