(iverson's) currentbuzz: Happy Birthday Blogging: Ten Years Old

God bless Elizabeth Spiers, founding editor of Gawker for saying "a blog is just a format for content. It's a way of presenting
information in a linear fashion, in reverse chronological order.
Ultimately, the blog is only as good as the information presented" which is of course what I say as a teacher and speaker whenever the word "blog" comes up.

I love it when Tom Wolfe reiterates what I tell my students and colleagues, even if he also says he is "...weary of narcissistic shrieks and baseless 'information,' " [and] no longer reads blogs.This is a great story with videos and interviews. Happy tenth birthday blogging.

One by one, Marshall McLuhan's wackiest-seeming predictions come true. Forty years ago, he said that modern communications technology would turn the young into tribal primitives who pay attention not to objective "news" reports but only to what the drums say, i.e., rumors.
Source: online.wsj.com

On the publishing side, the barriers to entry were replete with all manner of government regulation, massive capital requirements and steep learning curves, creating a natural status difference between publishers and subscribers. The publishers had massive status, the subscribers little or none. The Internet destroyed most of the barriers to publication. The cost of being a publisher dropped to almost zero with two interesting immediate results: anybody can publish, and more importantly, you can publish whatever you want. With the cost of publication at almost zero, the cost of subscribing to almost any community of interest also dropped to zero. Anybody can publish and anybody can subscribe, and publishers and subscribers are now two sides to the same coin. Any subscriber can actively participate in any community of interest by becoming a publisher in that community.
Source: online.wsj.com

From Jim Buckmaster of Craigslist: "I think our "citizen journalists" in the blogosphere protect us against

abuse of power to a far greater degree than the much ballyhooed

"citizen militia" afforded by gun ownership -- without the daily

carnage of accidental and impulse shootings."