shac has jumped on the blog-wagon now.
So is this just a fad? No, definitly not. Blogging has some qualities which will make it an enduring technology like we’ve seen happen with IM.
- Blogging is easy – The whole phenomenon has really taken off with the advent of user-friendly yet flexible systems bring one-click publishing to even the technical neophite. Accessible technology is explosive technology.
- Ease of use brings fresh content – It’s amazing how much more willing I am to drop a fresh entry on my blog than to go and edit any HTML source. I’m planning right now to replace my main page with a redirect to this blog, and move the “content” over to the right; and to do the same with many other informational pages both here and at work. No-one likes stale sites.
- There’s a community aspect – With commenting and trackbacks, it’s possible to build a fertile community of friends exchanging thoughts and ideas. A good RSS aggregator would let me keep tabs on my friends updates in one fell swoop.Keeping community — according to each member’s schedule — is appealing.
- Blogs are interesting – Well, not all of them. But I do find myself going back to certain blogs over and over because I really am interested in what those people have to say. There are a lot of interesting writers out there who aren’t published, and better yet, they tend to only blog when they’ve got something new to say. I can’t stand reading a majority of the published pieces out there which seem to be nothing more than filler for lack of real news. Blog entries are event-driven instead of deadline-driven
And if you still don’t believe me, go out and count how many teen blogs there are out there…
blog is the new black
i have come to really like the community+permissions aspects of livejournal. not only can i make my entries public or private, but i can also set the permissions to any group of my friends that i care to make up. of course they all have to be on livejournal… it would be nice if there were some magical way to make it possible to do this outside of a single site, but obviously there has to be some way to verify people… and i really like the idea of an independent blog on its own site for evident privacy/control reasons. there are some interesting questions involved in this whole phenomenon and how it might proceed.