OK, let’s expand on the brilliant teaser I left in the last entry:

OK, here’s the “blog about” way to explain it all:

• Blogs are highly overrated by blog authors/readers – I totally believe this is true in the majority of cases. Look at blogging – or any activity/construct – from the inside vs. outside: You have tunnel vision. If writing in ASP, yes, .NET will dominate the universe. If from the Java side, the Liberty Alliance will solve all our problems. Neither is true, both are limited in correctness, both have some degree of veracity. But what the hell does that mean? It means what you’re espousing is, basically, flawed. Uninformed. SUBJECTIVE, not OBJECTIVE. Blogs are no exception to this “self serving” rule: Who gives a rat’s ass (that’s in the dictionary, by the way…) if I know about/comment on “blah”? Damn near no one. I’m just spouting, and does anyone really care that I found this great little sushi place in [pick small city/suburb]? Maybe some, but this is not a great, earth-shattering discovery. Get over your importance bloggers!
• Blogs are highly underrated (not on radar for most) by non-blog authors/readers – At the same time, blogs serve a cause, even if it’s only cognitive dissonance (reaffirm what you already believe, valid or not…..). What if I were the resident expert – or one that has some veracity on the subject – on suburban [pick city] restaurants or sushi places? Hey, suddenly, my opinions matter. As a niche market (with exceptions), blogs rock. Somewhere — probably — there is a group of “battery collector” blogs. People that collect new and old batteries (9v, car batteries, I don’t know I’m making this up….). If I were looking for a pre-19xx 9v battery [one with the pentagonal plugs, not the current quadragenal ones…] I would check the blog [blah] to get info. Like a Web site — which the blog can entirely be (important; see Dave Winer’s site) — then that’s a good thing.

Blogs – in the same way as Web sites (except, with current tools, blogs are easier to maintain than other Web stuff) – do – or CAN change things.

It’s another environment/method to give the word out.

Remember: The Web was supposed to democrisize information. Remember that? Because anyone could do it (publish) for very little cost? (Yes, in the heady days, publication for NO cost. And today NetZero charges $9.95/mo for accesses….where is the ZERO???).

OK, that’s the short explanation. Long one? Hmmm.. value of a blogger! (?)

(NOTE: Continued on Friday, 02/21/20003)

While it’s hard to really hard to catagorize a group as broad as bloggers, I see the groups coming down to – for the most part – four catagories:

1. Naval gazers: I read somewhere – can’t recall where – that bloggers are, as a whole, a group of self-indulgent, self-important naval gazers. I think that this characterization – however harsh – is pretty accurate. I fall in the category. Hell, does anyone really need to read this blog? Will anything be lost in the world if it suddenly became a desktop blog instead of a Web-enabled one? Nope to both. What I say here really doesn’t matter to anyone but me for the most part, so there in lies the navel gazing. Which is fine – early Web “home pages” (does anyone call it that anymore?) – were much of the same. And now the “home page” nature of the Web is way minimalized, and – at the same time (I think it is a coincidence, but whatever) – blogs are filling this gap.
2. Niche publishers: This is one of the most compelling reasons for blogging: Much like Usenet groups (does anyone use those anymore?), they are a source for solid information for a very narrow interest. Like my example above about restaurant recommondations. I’m sure that, were I interested, I could find more than one blog that I could read occasionally for info on restaurants in my area. I’d probably find I could trust Blog A most of the time, unless it was Chinese cuisine, Blog B seldom but they find interesting places and so on. Dissemination of information that really doesn’t have a place anywhere else. I would put a lot of the blogs I read about technology (including blogs about blogs…how recursive!) in this catagory, although they are more prevalent, or at least easier to find, than other types of specialty blogs, due to the nature of the material and where it is published.
3. Notables: By this, I mean people like Moby (no, I’ve never read), who have a following and this another way to reach the masses. It also includes people like Dan Gillmor, who are in publication for a living (in this case, about technology). Blogs give individuals like Gillmor – or Tom Brokaw or whatever – an outlet to give more information back to reader, more than will fit below the fold in a newspaper or in a 30-second spot on the nightly news. This is powerful. For example, there is a trend for reporters to publish online the complete interviews they do, so one can see 1) how it differs from the published/broadcast version (and try to figure out they differ), 2) Gather info that just couldn’t fit in the original slot. Sure, for most people, who cares, right? But for people who are (for whatever reason) interested in the interview subject (person or topic), this is a gold mine. What’s the harm in publishing it? Before blogs, this just didn’t happen. Actually, I foresee newspapers and the like starting to pull this out of reporter’s blogs and into the online versions of the paper, for many reasons. (Ad revenue leaps to mind….). While I don’t know when the “cool” factor will burn off blogs for people like Moby and others, I can see it as a tool of continuing interest for reporters, such as Gillmor, and others. Especially as the technology gets better and publishing is easier. (Boy, here is an application for which voice recognition software would be ideally fitted: A blog is essentially a journal, not journalism, let’s say — it’s personal and less formal than traditional publishing. It’s like the author talking to you…interesting…)
4. Blog Notables (blogerati?): By this I mean the people who are essentially known for blogging only. Dave Winer leaps to mind, as does Clay Shirky. Sure, they have other jobs and so on, but they are primarily know — at least in BlogSpace — as Bloggers. One curious cross-over person here — to me — is Lawrence Lessig: While very well known as a blogger, he was one of the non-blogerati who embraced this tool and used it as a communication device, not just for the cool factor (as most Naval Gazers do). Obviously, Lessig has lots on his mind, but the blog is somehow a natural extension of his work it seems. Considering his work (copyright issues, Internet architecture and how it supports/suppresses information flow etc), the blog is a natural, but he’s a lawyer who has far greater issues than if his blog is up to date. But it somehow fits.

And – again – who cares what I say here? But that’s what I think, and I’m sticking to it.