blogging

JD points out that blogging is 10 years old this month. Today I was on a webinar panel, organized by Brian Anderson of PR/Newswire, discussing blogging. There were something like 3,000 people registered to listen and ask questions. Holy cow. For several years the number of active blogs has doubled every six months. That growth has slowed, according to the Technorati folks, but no one should doubt this: The world has changed. There is a new global conversation under way. There's no going back.

One of my favorite blogs is Creating Passionate Users, where Kathy Sierra's diagrams are as thought-provoking as her posts. Not long ago, some jackass posted threats in the comments on her website.

Continuing my riff on the four keys to a great news website:

I stumbled across a great quote from the late Douglas Adams, who noted that we think everything invented before we were born is normal, everything invented before we were 30 is exciting, and everything invented after that is an offense against the natural order of things.

Kevin Anderson hits the nail squarely:

Writing for the Club of Amsterdam, a futurist society, Milverton Wallace describes the rise of the amateur, "someone or an activity motivated by love" and not by the profit motive.

For those of us struggling to understand the consequences of opening up our local news websites to broad public participation, Ulises Ali Mejias has a helpful essay, Social Media and the Networked Public Sphere. He focuses on a key distinction between mass and public:

The Internet rewrites power structures. It's not just a matter of "information is power." It's also about the ability to speak, to communicate ideas and points of view. In the old hierarchical mass-media model, institutions (government, corporate) gathered and were reluctant to share such power. In the new world, social organization can proceed on a non-hierarchical model. Some might even call it a web (although arachnid webs actually are highly structured).