Well, you know the history of that statement, right? It was about defending the quality of science fiction, and noting that while there is plenty of crap science fiction, there is plenty of crap everywhere. Let's not get too defensive about this. My point was essentially not to overestimate the crap factor in 2.0.
> 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.
I wouldn't disagree with a word of this, although we could quibble over nuances.
Web 2.0 is mostly a bunch of hype, mostly when it colonizes anything
Well, this begs the question, I think. It's kind of what I'm trying to figure out. I'm not sure "web 2.0" actually means *anything*, but I haven't made up my mind, yet.
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.
Of course they are, even though there is something "democratizing" about them, as you yourself say. I was saying they are a *part* of web 2.0 because they are so much of what web 2.0 connects. If we're even partly right about web 2.0, it would barely be possible without blogs. IOW it's that democratizing thing.
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.
Again, no argument. Remember, though, that the term "weblog" originally (iirc) referred literally to logs of web *links*. Here's where boingboing is still in most respects a blog in the classic mode: links to other stuff. You can barely get more web 2.0 than that, can you? If, that is, web 2.0 means anything, and I'm even close to right about what it might be if it is.
Weblogs as blogs and blogging where people log their days, like public or semi-public journals/diaries/letters to friends and family are relatively new developments. So, from that perspective, blogs extend the ages-old diary genre, as well as zines, and blogging as that sort of extension of old genres (or whatever you want to call zines), are innovations within blogging. Which is then added to the decentrally-generated content element, and linking, and then you have , um, web 2.0?
Just askin'.
j
> the idiocrafication of the cosmos. entropy, d00d.
>
> I grok.
>
>
:-)
Speaking of crazy-ass crypto-(or maybe quasi-)fascist Heinlein, you may also remember that he preferred the term "SF" to "science fiction," because it could also be read as "speculative fiction." Maybe "web 2.0" is SF . . . or maybe it is, as you probably would prefer to say, better described by the late 90s term "vaporware."
I go back and forth, in case you can't tell.
j