On Guardian "Second Sight"...
So there's an article in today's Guardian Online supplement that I wrote about weblog culture. I'm pretty happy with it - I think I managed to say most of what I wanted to say. I'm not sure it'll convince anyone who isn't already convinced, but it might start pushing the debate in a slightly different direction - away from "dumb vs. not dumb" and more towards "well we're stuck with them, what do we do now". I had to edit it down by a couple of hundred words to get in under the word limit, so if I get time I'll stick up a full version at some point in the next few days. In the meantime, here's a quick quote from Second Sight:
A future weblogging culture should be able to find counterpoints to arguments, to identify experts quickly and easily, and it should help good commentary bubble up effectively from new or low-trafficked sites. Mechanisms that help us know who to read, who to trust and who to ignore should be permeating the entire community invisibly and pervasively.
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
Interesting article, I think it is important to deal with the oncoming situation rather than sit wishing it would go away.
Ensuring that people's voices are heard against the power curve is an interesting challenge and aspires to loosely connected and communication networks of people. Each group of people has different members and hopefully the non-overlapping edges of these circles amount to enough churn to stop the insular nature of the in-group. We all operate in our wells of 150 of people, weblogging is a way of at least hearing other narratives, even if you never meet the actual people, you can at least see the world from their point of view. It is a kind of low-level pattern matching AI that is needed, trying to classify all of this woud be madness. The tools are out there, but rudimentary.
→ Posted by: Gavin Bell at August 28, 2003 1:29 PM
Good article. The Guardian shows its worth once again, having the sense to publish quality weblog-commentary by bloggers themselves.
I'd appreciate it if you'd expand on one point of your argument, though. Your key example of the strains caused by the increase in the number of weblogs as the medium goes mainstream is the emergence of the separate, almost incestuous, warblogger community. Why is that a symptom of increased numbers in particular? Is this ground you've covered before?
→ Posted by: Gareth at August 28, 2003 1:56 PM