There’s a very thoughtful debate between Scot Hacker and Sean Graham about the significance of weblogs. My horribly reductive summary: Graham says, what’s the big deal? Weblogs are not significantly different from other forms of media. Hacker argues that actually, there’s a lot that’s new:
- “Self-publishing has never been this easy.
- The editorial/filtering role is now in the hands of every person (in a way that it wasn’t two years ago).
- RSS has moved the newswire feed from a push model to a pull model, and everyone can now have their own news feed.
- Blogs are so popular that old media is concerned about the eyeballs moving away from centralized media companies and out into the field.
- A journal was almost always a private thing. Now the concept of the public journal, with links, is an established part of the landscape.
- Two years ago the phenomenon (you yourself describe it as a phenomenon) didn’t exist – now it does. Clearly something is different from the same old shit.”
This is a serious, thoughtful discussion that covers a lot of ground (including the tired “journalists-vs-bloggers” debate) with careful argument and insight.
BTW, Hacker has moved his weblog to an MT based system running at his old site, the birdhouse.
