Blogs in the news, blog technology at work
Wednesday, February 28, 2001
The SF Chronicle has an article about blogs today. It's light, fluffy, yet vaguely cool, hip, and happening, a perfect combination for completely missing the point of what I consider to be the real heart and power of blogging technology.
It misses getting at the meaning of writing, reading and editing, the threading, shifting, and flowing serendipity of mulitiple voices, the changing defintions of community and collaboration, the value of archiving, the shift from centralization and vague ownership to P2P and distributed computing.
Well, it's a popular newspaper, a non-blogger explaining to non-bloggers. What can you expect?
Here at the ol' IU (conjuring an image of sitting next to the potbelly stove with my cowboy boots propped up on my rugged blonde oak desk, my stetson pushed way back on my head, slurping fresh hot steaming black coffee from a thick white porcelain mug, the dog asleep on the floor beside me- well, that's not me at all, but certain words and phrasing cause these images to pop into my head and I must write them down, gol'durnit... gosh, I must be a real blogger, going off on such meaningless tangents), uh, as I was saying... I think I need a new paragraph here.
Here at the ol'IU we could never have used one of those other blog sites. Even Edithispage isn't good enough. We need to own the application, Manila, to host it on our own server, to learn from it and tweak it and wonder about it.
Having access to the application has forced us to think of various uses for these kinds of sites, to see how they connect to each other, and to propel our thinking about about what we want to develop. Just reading RY's postings and what he points to shows the thinking this technology has provoked in him, which he would have tended towards, I think, anyway, but I think owning Manila and being a regular user has accelerated and deepened that thinking. Same, I would suspect, for CY, and some of her more recent research into and thinking about metadata, as well as XML.
Maybe they can each comment on this past year (we've just renewed licenses, so we must be having some kind of Manila anniversary) and talk about what they've learned technology-wise from having and using Manila. Also, there's lots to be said about the impact of Manila on our own little working group, and how we've used it to share work and work-related info.
Great post today by CY about a particular online community and how it works. A very good read. Technology: it's the people. That's it! It's the people. The technology is only as good as its users, and you need some real clever and present moderators who not only know how to guide a group but also how to make people feel welcome and thus, more productive.
Moments later: in the middle of writing that previous paragraph RY calls with the exciting news that Google is XML. See today's post. See, I was right when I wrote above about Manila's impact on us.
Why is Google and XML important? Well, for me it demonstrates clearly a way that information is delivered, not what it looks like, and huge databases, storehouses of all kind of info, can be delivered more or less raw but orderly, from one place to another. And I can imagine how info like this can be called from one server to another and re-processed for other uses and in another appearance.
What I saw looking out the window yesterday while sitting in the dentist's chair for over ninety minutes:
Say...
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