At The Whiteboard

Using RSS

If you're anywhere close to the Internet, you can't help but hear about blogs. It might be the second coming of the Gutenberg Printing Press, but I don't think it quite is. But let's talk about why it's important.

First of all, blog, which comes from web log. I have "bog" written up here, but I really mean blogs because there are probably 8 to 10 million blogs in existence. Now, where do they live? Well, they obviously live on the Internet, but there's something called the blogosphere. Now, I can't draw in 10 million little blogs, but the interesting thing about blogs is that there's lots of interconnection, interlinking so that you end up with something that's just completely filled in as a kind of social network of content and expression.

And I think the important thing about blogs is first of all, it's about opinion. it's about personality. It's about expressing yourself in a way that, well, we used to do in the old days of the Internet, What we call them personal Web pages and the problem with those personal Web pages is that, well, you needed to know HTML and you needed to know some scripting if you really want to have a cool Web page and you ended up putting lots of kinds of information on it, whereas a blog is really more like a diary, where you have a page here and here's today and here's the things that I'm talking about and here links out into the blogosphere and here's where I'm writing about tomorrow and here's a nice picture to do it. In fact, there are even photo blogs so that blogs are becoming the new container for people to express themselves in a very straightforward, simple way.

Another point of our blogs is this notion of transparency, which is the opposite. I'm not going to spell it out because I can't spell very well, but it's the opposite of opaque. In other words, you can see through it. Now, what can you see through? Well, because it's a medium in which people are expressing themselves and because it's connected to lots of different things. It's almost like a self-regulating mechanism that someone is going to call someone out if they don't think that they are telling the truth and that's why it's having an impact on journalism and that there are a lot of real journalists out there blogging, including us at CNET and ZDNet. And the impact is that it provides you with a form to quickly get out something and connect it to other things as a supplement and complement to traditional journalism.