Put
Weblogs To Work
This is an interesting piece from MacWorld
by Scot
Hacker. It's an interesting perspective on blogging, and the
excerpt below pretty much hits the nail on the head re. the real
potential of the Web.
With no paper, printing, or distribution
costs, the Internet has eliminated many of the financial barriers
to publishing. Whether you're a CEO, a scientist, or simply someone
with an opinion, the Web offers you unprecedented access to an
audience, as well as the ability to provide up-to-the-minute news.
That's assuming, of course, that you have the time and technical
skills to constantly update and maintain a growing Web site and
online community.
But now even these barriers are disappearing, thanks to the
rising popularity of Weblog systems, publishing tools that let you
post daily -- or even hourly -- Web content without writing a lick
of HTML.
The position espoused above is pretty much what the
real potential of the Web is all about. It is about empowerment,
freedom of expression, without the prohibitive cost of conventional
publishing outlet developement.
Funnily enough the first coming of the Web (I will
write about this in more detail in a future post) didn't really do
much for individual empowerment, if anything it mangled the vision;
you had topossess graphic design skills to do the simplest of
things becuse the perception that site beauty superceded content
quality.
To quote Jon Udell from last years
InfoWorld Innovator's award piece on Dave Winer (one of the
honorees):
"The Web was meant to be a medium for sharing
written communication, but things didn't turn out that way at
first. In Manila and now in Radio, Winer has been steadily reducing
the complexity of Web publishing."
Dave Winer added this
quote:
"In 1999 we got the
number of steps required to publish Web content down from 18 to
three," Winer recalls. "Now we're at zero steps.
Just save a file and you're done."
Zero Steps, basically signifythat the chasm
between the old web and the new web has finally been bridged (at
least technology wise).