But as with any revolution, we must ask whether we are being sold a naked emperor. Is blogging really an information revolution? Is it about to drive the mainstream news media into oblivion? Or is it just another crock of virtual gold – a meretricious equivalent of all those noisy internet start-ups that were going to build a brave ?new economy? a few years ago?
Shouldn’t we just be a tiny bit sceptical of another information revolution following on so fast from the last one – especially as this time round no one is even pretending to be getting rich? Isn’t the problem of the media right now that we barely have time to read a newspaper, let alone traverse the thoughts of a million bloggers? —Trevor Butterworth —Time for the last post (FT.com)
The point of blogging isn’t that you can easily read what other people write. It’s that they can easily read what you write. It’s not the reading that’s a new component of the blogosphere, it’s the writing.
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I guess we can get all chicken-and-eggy over this question, but it seems to me that if it weren't so easy to write and publish, it wouldn't matter how easy it is to read.
Of course the blogosphere isn't all about the writer. My point is that the ease of publication is the *new* thing. Vannevar Bush imagined that people would trade the chains or trails of annotation and connection that add value to the conventional published material. RSS is another excellent step towards that vision. But for me RSS is not the sine qua non of blogging.
Blogging is writer-centered rather than reader-centered? I dunno, Dennis. Maybe it is for you, but there's more than one way to approach a thing, and the existence of RSS feeds might offer a counter to your argument. Butterworth's argument misses the point in many ways -- but doesn't saying, in effect, "Blogging is all about me!" kinda miss the point too?