[thelist] What's with this blog thing, anyway?

Ray Hill lists at prydain.com
Thu Mar 28 21:20:01 CST 2002


> please don't take my above statement to mean I don't see the
> fuss over the social phenomenom of weblogging, I just can't
> see the point in the fuss made by many of the technique or
> concept of blogging as something new. Its the use by diverse
> ppl that makes it exciting.)

You're right, it's not so much the originality of Blogging that is
making it such a phenomena as it is the diversity and number of people
who are adopting it.  But there's more to it than that, or there
wouldn't be so many different people flocking to the banner.

In my opinion, it all comes down to usability.  One of the main
reasons that blogging is taking root so well is that it is incredibly
easy.  It's easy to set up initially, it's easy to post new entries,
and it's easy for the visitor to browse and/or search.

Sites like GeoCities and Tripod have been giving people free access to
posting their own content for years, but the process there has always
been clumsy and hard to figure out without a considerable bit of
dedication.  And you're stuck with the choice between using their very
limiting "easy" publisher or learning HTML and doing it all from
scratch.  While this was a very popular method of publishing for those
with the time and inclination to deal with the learning curve, the
majority of people out there just don't have time for it.

Blogging changes that is some very important ways.  Not only is it so
much simpler to use, but it also provides less daunting creation and
maintenance tasks.

With traditional web sites, getting started is often the hardest part
for the average user.  They know they want to have a site, but while
they sit there and stare at their electronic blank page, a form of
digital writers block is a common problem.  What should the site look
like?  What sections should it have?  Do they really have enough to
say about their favorite hobby to write a page about it?  Is it
worthwhile to have a links page if you're new to the web and don't
know that many sites yet?  These are all questions that Blog writers
don't have to worry about.  And since all this has to be figured out
before a full site is finished, most users will usually either give up
before it's done or have a "under construction" site for so long that
they lose interest.

Blogging solves most of these problems.  Since most blogs follow
pretty much the same format, very little thought has to be given to
presentation or structural organization issues.  Since blog entries
are short and sweet, the user doesn't have to worry about whether to
not they have enough to say on a certain topic to justify a whole page
or section on the site.  And since a blog is essentially just a single
page that the tools create for you in a matter of seconds, the initial
start up process becomes a no-brainer.

The other issue with traditional web sites that leads to many existing
sites being abandoned is freshness.  If you ceate a site that just has
a page for each of your interests and maybe a few picture albums (like
most people's first sites are), it's really hard to keep the site
fresh.  After spending all that time to get the thing up and running,
it's fairly rare that you'll have something new to add to the existing
topics, and adding new topics is still a pain in the arse.

With a blog, though, that almost entirely backwards.  Not only is it
incredile easy to add new content and keep it fresh, but since people
can see the dates of your posts, there's actually more incentive to
keep adding new content.  And as pretty much any writer will tell you,
the more often you write, the easier it is to write.  So while
old-school sites promote staleness, blogs promote up to date content
and a continual process.



> But then again, compare this to a few thousand USENET users
> doing the same thing in a different way. Its really just a
> continuation of things.

More a mutation than a continuation, I think.  While it is the same
general concept (people publishing content), the ownership changes
hands here, which is something worth noticing.  When you post to a
BBS, you're contributing to a public discussion, but you don't have
anything that is really *yours*.

With blogs, people have a very personal forum in which they can
develop content that is strictly related to themselves.  Instead of
primarily posting responses to *other* people's ideas (as my
experience has shown makes up most usenet posts), they're posting
their own ideas and observations about what's going on around them.
That's not only an incredibly empowering thing for an individual, but
also a good way to establish an ongoing record of your life and
personal evolution (picking up where personal journals left off).



> I just thought of something closer to what can be seen in
> blogs..the widespread use of e-mail. E-mailing your thoughts
> to your friends and family has become very popular in recent
> years, and popping off a quick/short e-mail to someone you
> know (or don't for that matter) comes natural to a wide range
> of ppl (net savvy and not).

I would agree completely!  And I would argue that email has a lot of
the same benefits over other person-to-person communication methods
that blogging has over other publishing methods.  Like a blog, email
follows a very standard format (to, from, subject, body, etc) and
thanks to folks like Hotmail and Yahoo is very easy and inexpensive to
set up.  It also makes short, to-the-point messages more appropriate
than they are in letters or phone calls.

Also, it's worth noticing that blogs are capitalizing on people's
existing familiarity with email.  When you write a blog entry, all
you're filling out ig the subject and body.  So really, all you're
doing is writign an email to yourself (or to the universe at large, I
guess) that doesn't require you to fill in the "to" field.  That would
help explain why blogging tools are so intuitive to new users, since
the mojority of the skills they need to post blogs they've already
learned when they got started with email.



> Kinda cool.

I'll say!!  The blogging revolution is probably the most interesting
things going on on the web these days, in my opinion.  I can't wait to
see how blogs evolve and what they mutate into as the today's
web-savvy children grow up and start to feel limited by the standard
format of blogs...


--ray





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