Blogging - weblogs

Whole Earth, Winter, 2000 by Mark Frauenfelder

The first approximation of an innovation goes only halfway to realizing its full impact. Two generations ago many people imagined a horseless-carriage, or automobile. However, very few imagined the second-order disruption of this horseless carriage--parking lots and traffic jams. And virtually no one foresaw the third-order consequence of this second-order disruption (car plus parking lot) which was suburbia.

Hypedinking--the foundation of the Web--had long been prophesized by visionaries like Ted Nelson and others. In fact their descriptions of how hyperlinking would work were very prescient. But neither Ted Nelson, nor anyone else involved in pioneering hypertext (including we who worked on the early hyperlinked version of the Whole Earth Catalog in 1986) ever imagined the most profitable (to date) use of hyperlinking, which is to sell junk on eBay.

The following report is an early look at another unexpected use of hyperlinking, another one that escaped anyone's prediction. It is hard to tell whether this is a trivial exploitation of this technology, or profound. The author, Mark Frauendfelder, has a great track record for uncovering street uses of technology that later play out large. Mark, in fact, was the first person to alert me to eBay, when it was still just a small-time Bay Area flea market for collectors and Beanie Baby fanatics. Mark once published a popular zine of street trends called Boing Boing, and was an early Wired editor.

I grabbed this report which he had circulated to several magazines after they rejected it because it was too "fringe." On the Web, fringe is front and center.

--KK

WHAT CAN YOU WRITE ABOUT A WEB SITE, BESIDES "IT'S COOL," OR "IT'S NOT COOL.?" wondered Jorn Barger. But when you link to an interesting article within a site, there's plenty to write about, and if you're smart, funny, or outrageous, eventually you're going to get a following of regular visitors--as Barger does, in his extraordinary and eclectic Robot Wisdom (www.robotwisdom.com), one of a growing breed of self-expressive Web sites for which Barger coined the term "weblogs."

Weblogs (or blogs, as the blogging inner circle sometimes calls them) are different from "favorite site" lists, which are typically just a bunch of links to the front pages of sites. Weblogs link to specific pages, otherwise known as "deep links." The purpose of a Weblog is not just to recommend URLs, but to opine on them as well. Think of a weblog as a journal of one person's explorations as he or she cruises uncharted sectors of the Net, reporting on the interesting life-forms and geological formations.

The people who publish weblogs are like pre-surfers, or tour guides. There's a blog for every taste. The best are published by opinionated, perceptive people who write about sites you might never find on your own. A blog's links reveal the blogger's worldview. "They're an online extension of yourself," explains Cameron Barrett, a Web designer from Ann Arbor, Mich., who publishes www.camworld.com.

Weblogs are as different as the people who publish them. Some are close to being headline aggregators, such as Robot Wisdom, which consists mostly of links, short descriptions, and excerpted sentences from news stories he finds--"Detailed critique of MacOS-X's new Aqua interface," "Michael Gross on the fashion-model-agency sex scandals." Others are more like online diaries: Paul Perry's Alamut.com is light on links, but heavy on personal introspection--"It was a month ago, on the 26th of December, that the fundament of my earthly kingdom, the love of my life, announced the end of our seven-year relationship." Occasionally, blogs end up delivering too much personal info, like this example from RiotHero.com, maintained by a 15-year-old boy: "[4:45] Oh shit. Lyda is coming over now, and I'm going to take a shower before she comes. (We've been dating only 4 months ... so I'm still trying to impress her with my `fresh' scent.)"

Does Lyda know what's in store for her?

Weblogs aren't just all fun and games. Some, like Xblog (http://www.xplane.com/xblog/) should be required reading for anyone involved in digital design. Companies are increasingly getting in on the blog action. Vincent O'Keeffe, a "user experience architect" for Octagon Technologies, a Web development company in Dublin, Ireland, says he maintains a weblog "to keep track of net flotsam and jetsam that I think is interesting to me and to the rest of the team in relation to projects we're working on." O'Keeffe uses a free Web-based weblog creation tool from Blogger.com to publish his internal weblog. Blogger.com, and weblogs, he says, are "a complete paradigm shift in the way I browse and learn--like a limb I never knew I missed until I found it."

Sean Carton, co-owner of Carton-Donofrio Interactive, a Web advertising agency in Baltimore, Mary., says public weblogs will start showing up on more commercial sites, too. "Everyone's trying to build bogus `community' sites with bbs software, but they don't always work so well. Weblogs succeed because they combine commentary with content--always a nifty combo." Carton points to Streettech.com, a hardware and software review site that his company owns. Cartons says the addition of a weblog to Street Tech has resulted in a "rapid increase in traffic" to the site.