Slashdot Mirror
The Scoop on Bloggercon III
Trizor writes "Bloggercon III commenced today with the opening session ending in a singalong of 'This land is your land'. The sessions ranged from introductions on blogging to a comparison of bloggers and journalists. The developers at O'Reilly have provided notes, coverage, and commentary on the event."
A lot of webloggers allow the owners to post articles, and then have a section for comments attached to each article. If you check out an active blog over on Livejournal, you'll find that most postings have a fair number of comments. Slashdot shares this characteristic in spades. Slashdot also gives each of us a journal. On the web. One might almost call that a weblog. The usual connotation of weblogs as a journal of personal information rather than bleeding edge nerd commentary is probably what makes the classification seem wierd, and I'll admit that I felt the same when you brought it up.
Blogs are the best thing since the Internet, no wait, blogs _are_ the Internet, blogs are the Ubernet, blogs, blogs, have you seen my latest MovableType template?, I prefer WordPress, my grandpa has a blog and now he's blogging about his rectal warts isn't that great, RSS, Atom, Atom, RSS, big media is dead, CNN should just hire a bunch of bloggers and fire all those journalists, blogs will save the rainforest, I met my ex-girlfriend on blogger.com but she's now blogging another blogger, blogosphere is such a witty word, blogs are cool, blogs are better than sex, Einstein was a blogger.
Politicians should have a blog, housewives should have a blog, my boss should blog, dogs should blog, blogs should blog, blogblogblog.
What rolls down stairs
Alone or in pairs...
Rolls over your neighbor's dog?
What's great for a snack
And fits on your back?
It's bLog! bLog! bLog!
It's bLo-og, it's bLo-og
It's big, it's heavy
It's wood!
It's bLo-og, bLo-og
It's better than bad
It's good!!!
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
The thing about blogs is that I think it was a really obvious idea. There were loads and loads of people doing webpages, updated daily, when the blogging concept took hold. For instance, when I relaunched my website around 2000, I had my designer build a custom database so that I could easily post content from a webpage. Then blogs started getting big, and even though I didn't call my site a blog, it had a huge amount of characteristics in common with blogs.
I think the most important story about blogs is the emergence of back-end software like movabletype and wordpress. No longer were the developers of content stuck with the obvious kludge of using Frontpage or some other mediocre web site creator to post daily content. Wordpress and its ilk lets you post content, and incorporate a bunch of useful blog-related features, without reinventing the wheel.
But, as I said, I just don't find the "blog" concept that interesting. It's an obvious concept that was being practiced by thousands of websites long before somebody tacked the repulsive-sounding name "blog" on what they were doing.
In my eyes, far more interesting than blogs is the emerging iPodder concept. Here, people are adopting the very same tools used in blogs (wordpress, movabletype, etc), and using them to attach mp3 files of radio shows to the Internet. Internet radio has been around for a while, but the iPodder concept that taps into RSS sites is incredibly interesting.
To put it another way, blogs made me yawn and say, "I've already been doing this for months." Whereas podcasts made me say, "This is truly revolutionary. We finally have a way for individual content creators to break the Clear Channel hegemony."
Two months ago there were fewer than fifty podcasted radio shows. Now there are well over 200. I've been having a great time doing mine, which I post to a RSS feed for users of ipodder, and post to my website for people who visit it regularly.
One last comment on podcasting. There is a huge but limited number of people who want to surf the web or fire up their RSS feeder to read a variety of blogs. That circle of people draws from a very different population than those who want to listen to radio shows. And shows like mine can offer compelling content that there's a big demand for, but that traditional advertisers would boycott. The real news about the democratization of media isn't happening at a third annual blogging conference; it's happening right now with the emergence of ipodder radio shows.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Blogger con is just Dave Winer's latest lame attempt to be relevant and hijack internet hipsters into endorsing him for High Priest of blogging. We don't need any idiots like Winer telling us what we've already been doing.