There's nothing new about "blogging". Every night during
the Fringe Festival in 1996 I'd come home and post to
the Mirror's BBS about what I saw and heard, trying to
convey the essence of the Fringe, and trying by example
to show how we could be using the online world. It wasn't
"blogging" since the word didn't exist. I didn't get the
concept from anything online. I got it from Richard Brautigan
and others issuing broadsides in San Francisco in 1967
with a Gestetner machine. They didn't just post
announcements, or write about what happened, but at
times even posted as things were in progress. I waited twenty
years between reading about that and having internet access,
twenty years before I had the printing press to do it.

And when I met zinester Emily Pohl-Weary some years back,
I was able to put my hands on her grandfather's
autobiography; I'd kept it handy because of the
discussion of science fiction fanzines in the late thirties.
Self-publishing, and breaking the lines between readers
and writers.

A few months later in 1996 when I got full internet access, I
was posting little bits about upcoming events and things
I'd seen to the local newsgroup, mtl.general. I was
a) trying to show how we could use the medium for
immediacy, b) staking a claim for small groups c) creating
content that I hoped would keep people reading the newsgroup
so they'd be around to see what others were posting and
even reply when people asked questions and d) I hoped
by example that others would follow.

Ask Kate about the time I posted about when some guys
lived in a window at The Bay in 1999, or about the lineup
when the first of the more recent Star Wars films came
out. I had no model, it came naturally. I didn't have
to break away from passivity that is so common in old
media, because I'd grown up with magazines where the
letter columns were big, and the readers were the writers,

Kids today, they don't have to wonder what to do with
the medium, they are just following others. It's trendy
to have a blog, even if you have nothing much to say.

It was an attempt at a cluster, just like a newspaper
is a cluster of relatively different things, each of
which may lure a reader to the other things. Or
alternately, it gets the information out to a wider
spread of readers.

Most of the times in a decade that the ham radio
fleamarkets have been in the local buy and sell
newsgroup (and in effect out into the public
eye since publicity is so lousy) it's because I've
posted about them. Nobody will enter ham radio if
they aren't learning about it in their lives in
the first place.

The internet gives everyone their own printing press,
the same way those hand presses gave Fred Pohl
and the other SF writers the ability to publish,
and just like that legendary Gestetner machine gave
near instant publishing to the counterculture forty
years ago.

After that, it really means nothing. You can keep
a webpage updated without blogging software, or you
can use blogging software to create a static page.

Blogging is way too self-referential, which may
be due to it not being a shared communal/cooperative
space like a newsgroup, but in essence "my space',
where one person writes at the hidden readers, and
then sometimes they can talk back. Hence it's
self-referential because few are talking with
each other, they are mentioning something they
read somewhere else and then commenting in their
own space.

But that self-reference seems to feed this "let's
define it" when a more general viewpoint is completely
lacking.

Small groups need communal spaces, because then
people they don't already know may learn about them.
Mailing lists thirty years ago were limited to people
who were already in the know, though at least back
then they had the excuse of having no better means.

Small groups need to keep updated webpages, because
it may be the only means they have of reaching the
general public. They need to learn that they can
be far more verbose than when they can only scrounge
two lines in the paper. They need to treat the
webpage as the document of record, instead of
running to old media every time they have to say
something (though they still need to do that,
because they've not built up clusters in the past
decade). They also may need to keep a constant
feed of information or gossip, so the readers
keep coming back and then will see any Important
News.

It doesn't matter whether they use blogging software
or not to do all this. And it's merely "keeping
a webpage", it doesn't have to be drawn into
this "blogosphere" that I'd never heard of until
I started seeing it in the paper. (This onerous
"Web 2.0" too, only people who came in late would
think there is anything new happening, and only
people who came in late would think the internet
was commercial first.)

It does matter that they take control, instead
of letting some guy take care of the webpage.
Glossy is the enemy of information, because it
makes things too complicated to update easily.
But then, all those webpages with High Gloss are
likely because the owner (or the guy who made
the page) thinks a webpage is a magazine at
the newsstand which has to attract the attention
of the passerby. The reality is nobody passes
by a webpage, they go there deliberately.

The revolution is that we own the words, we own
the space. So anyone trying to get "creditation"
is missing the point. By the time you get there,
you aren't doing anything different. You shouldn't
need it to write something, because all those
small groups should be putting their press releases
up on their websites anyway. The Gazette is adding
all those blogs because blogs are getting hyped,
blogs are hip. Someone writes about their cat,
and they get nearly a full column length, but
the fact that I've been posting about used
book sales for a decade means nothing because I'm
not a "blog".

If those small groups can't be bothered letting loose
information (and it shouldn't be conditional on whether
we need to know or are already joined up or even because
they want something from us), then let the third parties
fill the gap.

All these old media sites are not adding blogs because
they feel a need for regular updates, they are doing
it because that's what you do now. Any time in the past
decade or more, they could have been slapping up information
or even gossip (because gossip is a connecting thing), but
they saw no point. They want it because they want to be
hip, in the same way that over a decade ago they'd start
boasting about how "interactive" they were. They were no
more or less than they'd ever been, they simply made it
a bigger issue, because they wanted to catch up with
the internet.

Drop the whole notion of "blogs". Then start analyzing what's
being said. That's all that counts. It doesn't matter what's
being used to publish online, it doesn't matter whether it's
personal or public, personal or commercial, updated regularly
or infrequently, it only matters that someone is saying something
valuable. The rest falls into place after that.

Michael

(Yes, I know, it all sounds pedantic. Just watched some Fry and Laurie...)