So, Bloggle is undergoing changes. It’s not alone — the changes really reflect only some of the changes that have been happening in the life of your trusty author. And this is…
The Rest of the Story
Five years ago — only five? — when I started Bloggle I was a happy Web Geek, doing happy Web Geek things, i.e. building Web sites for companies that were only beginning to realize that this Internet thing was more than just a passing fad. Maybe I had a jump-start: I’d been building online bulletin-board systems for a number of years when the behemoth began to stir.
The Internet was there… had been there for years! It was only this new itch between the behemoth’s shoulderblades — the Web — that proved so much more compelling than so many itches that had come before: Gopher, WAIS, etc. Tim Berners-Lee put together a simple transfer protocol mixed with a startlingly simple, stripped-down version of SGML that made it easy to create pages that could be shared with a thousand million people all over the planet. And then in a coup de grace, Mark Andresen added pictures [!] and a killer app was born.
Bloggle’s birth was the result of a new flea on the back of the monster… the weblog, or blog. The phenom that is blogging grew out of an aspect of the Web that, looking back, I can admit I didn’t really understand. There were thousands of personal Web sites. Maybe hundreds of thousands. Vanity sites, personal paeans, or just silly collections of dancing hampsters… in my view they only added to the wrong side of the signal to noise ratio. Sure, there were a few pages out there that communicated something important, something relevant. By my measure, they were few and far between.
And then this blogging thing. What need was there for a tool that allowed the huddled masses to blurt with amazing simplicity and no editorial process whatsoever whatever they had on their mind at the moment? Who would be interested what Zannah had for breakfast? Or what Cam’s point of view was on virtually anything? And what was the deal with Zannah linking to Cam’s commentary and adding still more commentary on the side of what was – to me – a fairly empty point to begin with?
Slowly, oh so slowly, comprehension dawned. First was the realization that, just as I had found some small number of these personal sites – these blogs – to have something of interest to me, so too had other people with views strikingly different from my own. For every Zannah there were a hundred like-minded people. Maybe more. Maybe many, many more.
And this linking thing… once I got it, I was amazed just how short-sighted I’d been. Maybe I’d spent so much time immersed in the data networks that pulsed just below the surface of things that I hadn’t been paying attention to what was developing above the surface.
And it hit me like a heavy-handed scifi plot reveal… The OSI model was wrong: there are eight layers to the network, and the top layer is people!
Right before my very eyes – before the eyes of all of us! – a vast human network had emerged and it was chock full of a hundred thousand points of view, and it was focused by a lens made up of a million links to kindred content authored by kindred spirits. And it was going to change everything.
And so I started Bloggle. ‘Cause I was damned if I was gonna miss out on something that I’d been in the middle of right from the start.
[Continue to Chapter II, in which your trusty author discovers what can happen when people chase their dreams...]
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May 24, 2004 at 12:06 pm
heya dougie!
as scaa chief ted lingle sez: “relationships are the energy vortex that serve all change.”
or to quote e.m. forster: “only connect.”
i remember one of the first blogs i ever saw was a site run by a japanese teen chick who collected sparkly hello kitty stickers for cellphones.
trivial consumerism? or the voice of an asian teen generation expresssing its new reality in symbols i didn’t understand, icons for which i lacked reference? after all, beatles haircuts once seemed trivial too. . .and look what that turned into. . .
despite the exaggerated claims of the pseudo pundits and self-promoting war bloggers, the alternate media effect is real. as you can see anytime you look at a blog by an iranian girl under 30.
that’s major-geopolitical change coming, viewed small and made real.
our dopey coffee blogs are no different. the coffee crisis is a failure of the global economic system, one that affects 25 million families in coffee-producing countries. it’s serious stuff.
eisenhower remarked that if a problem seemed intractable, enlarge it. but that’s not how the coffee crisis is gonna work.
we are going to solve the coffee crisis when the average coffee lover — people like us — make a tiny change in their daily routine. when they buy a slightly different kind of coffee, a better tasting coffee.
altering the angle of their reach in the a&p to move from “the cans” to something else. that’s all it takes. . . and in a little while, the world will suddenly be radically different.
May 28, 2004 at 1:47 am
And yet, You don’t even give credit to the blogger, which powers this blog.
May 28, 2004 at 9:44 am
Hello, Anonymous II!
That’s part of my point, isn’t it? That in the end it’s not so much about the technology, but about how people use it? What people *do* with it?
Certainly, Blogger [and the other blogging tools] paved the way for a whole population of less-than-techy people to publish their thoughts to the world, but it wasn’t the *tool* that made the human connections… it was the 10,000 humans at 10,000 keyboards.
Even now I’m still impressed – increasingly so – with what Blogger enables me to do… and that’s to spend my time writing, and thinking, and connecting, rather than dinking ’round with HTML markup, and FTP and its ilk.
By the same token, however, should ever I write the great American novel, I don’t know that the first thing I’m going to do is thank my word processer.
;)