[Blogging] makes everyone a producer of news, for one thing. Not everyone does create news, some just transport them also. Every blogger does a bit of both, I guess. And that adds up to a sort of global brain, which digests ideas or discovers facts and such. The speed and variety of this conversation might be something very new in world history — we’ll have to see where it takes us, and if it improves certain things.
Personally, the strongest effect blogging had on me was that I could finally talk to people through my website in a sort of standardized way that would just work. I had a certain other site which I just shut down because it didn’t find its audience? it was a “homepage” in the worst sense of the word. Every news bit I added to it was structured into some sort of navigational hierarchy, which is totally meaningless in terms of talking to someone. A blog is simple to explain technically, but the fact that it allows you to start a conversation is really what makes it so different from regular “homepages.” —Philipp Lenssen —10 Questions with Philipp Lenssen (The Geek Guy Rants)
I stumbled into the blogging format for similar reasons. My blog started as a collection of instructional handouts that I was adding to regularly as I noticed patterns in my reaction to student work. It was a huge pain to change menus throughout my website every time I added a new document. Plus, every time I expanded a certain idea into a whole paragraph, I felt the need to rewrite other handouts on a similar topic.
It’s one thing to create a single website or a collection of web pages, but it’s another thing entirely to maintain a huge site as it develops and grows organically. Lenssen here does a good job capturing the essence of that difference.