> i don't think it's that simple. i'm going to invoke sturgeon's law: 90% of
> everything is crap.
My response is that Sturgeon's Law falls into that 90%. In reality, most of everything is much better than crap.
> blogs are a big part of the web 2.0 thing. there was an interesting thread
> on nettime, recently, although it was mostly a series of gestures toward
> answers, about blogs, the personal/political, etc. the initial post traded
> mainly on the term "banal". but isn't the thign about banality precisely
> that it's everywhere? lol.
I think that blogs are a good development, in fact the best fulfillment of the web as participation that had been predicted by people back in the 20th century. Blogs also been very important in decentralizing opinion and analysis, a phenomenon that I think most old school news and opinion sites have seen in their traffic logs.
People want to have ownership over their own writing and projects.
I was thinking about this the other day when I was reading or listening to something about typewriters. Typewriters were a technology that greatly democratized journalism, but they have their limitation, especially the ability to easily make edits. The Internet and blogs have greatly democratized writing.
Web 2.0 is mostly a bunch of hype, mostly when it colonizes anything beyond the new technologies being used to run websites. Blogs really aren't Web 2.0. If anything, they are an extension of the diary format that goes back centuries. Or more recently, the personal zine genre. I can support my last connection by noting that the early adopters in the blogosphere were the people who had been publishing zines in the 1990s. They quickly saw that blogs were just a different type of zine. Popular blogs like boing boing started out as zines.
> the idiocrafication of the cosmos. entropy, d00d.
I grok.
Chuck