Once again, it appears that librarians are leading the way in analyzing and explaining a key information distribution technology. Greg Notess, a columnist fo the library magazine Online, has an excellent article entitled The Blog Realm: RSS, Aggregators, and Reading the Blog Fantastic. He also wrote a column on blogs last month, called "The Blog Realm:Ü
News Sources, Searching with Daypop, and Content Management".
But for every blogger out there, there are probably a dozen or more others who prefer reading to writing. With the explosion of Weblogs come new ways of reading them.The solutions used to keep up with blogs are often called news aggregators. Much of the current software is still buggy and imperfect. It is in some ways like the early days of the Web when many issues were still being resolved, but these approaches may well become more integrated into e-mail, Web browsing, and stand-alone software in the next few years.
Makes me proud to be a librarian, it does.
(Thanks to Corante on Blogging for the reference.)
According to this article in O'Reilly's Mac Dev Center, all the things I'm doing to try to prevent my address from being harvested by "spambots" fall into the "completely to mostly useless" catagory. They do mention a tool that sounds intriguing, called SpamFire, which works with any Mac mail client to filter out spam. Will have to download it and try it with Eudora, my client of choice.
My colleague's blogs are sprouting up all over. Jeff Sonstein has several, and Mike Axelrod has one now. Mike's started his with a discussion of whether blogs are, indeed, the "next big thing."
So now I'm looking about and I see signs of convergence again. The trackback, the ping, the post and counter post and the centralization and searchability of personal writing. We exist as individual authors, yet we live in a community. A community that does not want walls and boundaries. A community however can not exist with them. So perhaps the new walls and boundaries of writing on the internet have been redefined as "linkages" and response.
Speaking of links going round-and-round...
I followed a few links on the Tara Grubb political weblog trail after reading about her candidacy on Joi Ito's blog, and somehow ended up at an interesting piece on theobvious.com. Lots of heated discussion there about the significance (or lack thereof) of a relatively peripheral congressional candidate using a blog as a key communication tool. My favorite line from that debate:
Weblogs are a means of politics as usual. They have, as the Firesign Theater liked to say, "A power so great that it can only be used for good or evil." And you can quote me on that.
But what was really interesting was that when I backed up to the root level of theobvious.com, I found an article about RSS, which in turn led me to Paul Ford's really excellent piece on "the Semantic Web," (which was also a topic on Joi's blog today).
So, it may be a big web, but it seems to keep circling around the same relatively small set of ideas. Or maybe it's just me going in circles. (Very possible, given the large doses of benadryl I'm taking tonight...) Tomorrow I might start building a "map" of my own personal view of blogspace.
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