The Weblog Revolution How technology and amateurs are changing the way we communicate

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The Weblog RevolutionHow technology and
amateurs are changing the way we communicate

• Meg Hourihan
• March 29, 2003

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Outline of discussion

• What is a weblog?
• Whats the big deal?
• Ways in which were using them
• Whats coming next?

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What is a weblog (blog)?

• Web page with small chunks of hypertext
• date-stamped
• ordered reverse-chronologically
• newest information at the top of the page
• Chunks called Posts
• Posts links commentary

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What is a blog (contd)?

• Web native format
• Beyond the page paradigm
• Post is self-contained topical unit
• Liberates writer from word count
• Distributed
• Social
• Often Personal
• Easy!

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Anatomy of a weblog post
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A collection of posts
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Why the definition matters

• To help get it
• To discuss distributed nature
• To identify broader value
• More than homepages
• Not just journals or diaries

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But, the definition is evolving

• Because blog can be more than text
• Video blogs (vlogs)
• Photo blogs
• Blog frequent updates
• Blog easy
• Blog published to Web

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So wheres the revolution?

• All these small pieces
• IM (AIM, ICQ)
• Blog posts
• Photos
• Small .mp3 files or .wav
• Video snippets
• Empowering the amateur
• Wayne and Garth with unlimited distribution
  potential

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Weblogs as journalism

• Are they journalism or arent they?
• Wrong question
• Its symbiotic
• Peer-to-peer journalism (P2PJ)
• This label has fallen away a bit
• Lets look how they work

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P2PJ Distributed Content

• Benefits of distributed system
• RSS, etc.
• Censorship, control, replication
• Hard to stop
• This is good!

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P2PJ Distributed Perspectives

• Consolidation of media
• Amateurs driven by passion not business
• Individual sites
• Shoe bomber detail
• Group sites
• Collaborative media
• Kaycee Nicole
• MetaFilter, Kur5hin, etc.

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Whats this mean today?

• Kevin Sites blog
• CNN doesnt get it yet
• http//dearraed.blogspot.com
• http//www.back-to-iraq.com/
• Chrisophter Allbritton (AP NY Daily News)
• 10,000!
• Warbloggers Sept. 11

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Units of one or two

• Embedded reporters
• Tech-enabled
• Embloggers
• Diary of war
• One slice
• Unilaterals sending emails

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Something larger going on here

• Weblogs only a piece
• Different reporting
• Different ways of sharing
• Communication through social networks
• No longer bounded by geography

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Enabling the revolution

• Two sides to the weblog equation
• Writing
• Reading

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Writing has advanced

• No more horseless carriage
• We say car and ask what features you need
• 2nd generation tools are enabling the production
• Movable Type
• Radio
• Blogger

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Reading is behind

• Information overload
• How do I find the good stuff?
• How do I know its been updated?
• How do I trust it?
• RSS readers
• Too hard for novice
• Cant scale

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Making reading easier

• Weblogs are fundamentally social
• Social software
• Decentralized unlocked
• Group communication
• Blogdex is the first step
• Going from there

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Beyond the power law
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Lafayette Project

• Not weblog search
• Google/Blogger does that
• People driven vs. keyword driven
• Identify your social network
• Expand it
• See what happens

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Yesterday, today, tomorrow

• We read tens of weblogs
• Now we read hundreds
• Can we read thousands? Tens of thousands?
• Can the tools scale with the content output?

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What does the future portend?

• Weblogs as accessible media
• Reading thousands each
• Writing millions of bloggers, worldwide
• Forgetting about the term
• Natural way to have pages that have frequent
  content

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The future contd

• Development of business models
• Part of trusted media networks
• CNN hosts blogs in the next war
• Tech advancements enables cool stuff
• Integration of location-based services with
  frequent-update capabilities

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So much else too!

• Business potential
• Cluetrain communications
• Intranets
• Academic potential
• Dept. intranets
• Idea exchanges and repositories
• Niche publishing
• Gawker.com and Gizmodo.com

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Where to start writing

• Blogger
• http//www.blogger.com
• Free
• Easiest to begin with
• Publish in less than two minutes!
• Now owned by Google

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Where to start reading

• Technorati Top 100
• http//www.technorati.com/cosmos/top100.html
• Daypop top 40
• www.daypop.com/top
• Sidebars/blogroll of ones you like

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A few I enjoy

• www.kottke.org
• www.boingboing.net
• www.rebeccablood.net
• www.scripting.com
• www.instapundit.com
• www.nickdenton.org
• www.harrumph.com
• www.onfocus.com
• Mine www.megnut.com