As Bloggers May Think
I had finally gotten around to playing with this “blogging” thing the kids are all talking about these days, and I was chatting about it with Mike H.
[03:40] sui66iy: is there an auto-blog? it could digest other blogs and automatically generate new ones…
As it turns out, a Salon article that I was reading pointed me to something similar–a site which uses blog references to determine the flavor du jour.
One of the interesting recent blog-memes has been the idea of exposing HTTP referrer logs in a way that allows the readers of an article to see who’s been linking to it, and what they’re saying about it. One of the primary vectors of this idea, disenchanted.com, has a discussion of how it relates to its Memex/Xanadu ancestry. I think their browser plugin idea is too wonky, but I do think they (and all these other guys) are on to something–that bloggers are chomping through the info-space like so many earthworms, leaving a rich trail of organization and context in their wake for those who know how to look for it (to torture a metaphor or three).
Is blogging anything more than the democratization of content management systems? Maybe not, but by making content creation less of a pain, it makes it a lot more appealing for the hoi polloi to create (or at least contextualize) on a daily basis. Has Google already cornered the means of extracting the value from all this distributed work?
This is probably all obvious and/or worthless, which is why I’m posting it to my own blog.