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Does that mean Jakob will have to go back and change his story? It turns out I didsell some books through Wordsworth. S. Kharbanda wirtes, "just ran all our logs...you had 2 sales towards the end of july-- one for $17.51 and another for $91...maybe this is a start." Yeah, but does it look as good as it feels? Dave notices that both Chris and I have succumbed to weblogorrhea, and adds, "To people who criticize weblogs, yeah it's a great big circle jerk, and it feels great!" For no particular reason, here's a condensed version of the email I wrote my fellow Cluetrainers last November, not long after Dave, through patient and repeated pounding on my head, finally woke me up to weblogs' true potential: Crew... Weblog is something of a catch-all term. Basically, it's a news site: a "log" of the stuff the author finds interesting. Behind it is software that makes adding content easy. The author sends formatted email to a special address, or posts something through a browser interface, perhaps with rudimentary html (say, for links). Think of it as webtop news publishing, with no intermediaries, no bureaucracy, no organization, nothing to come between lung and lips. In other words, an instrument of that thing we alone obsess about: voice. Some weblogs simply webify emailed text. Some have discussions on the side. Most of them, (see http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/WWW/Web_Logs/) are personal. The best are driven by a cause. Linux Today and Slashdot are two examples. The software behind both are private hacks by their authors. (Linux encourages this kind of thing.) If Microsoft weren't so distracted by stuff, "blogging" would become a FrontPage feature. Weblogs are also an extremely significant market development that I wish we had written about. It is not only highly vocal, but highly conversational, and very much a native creature of the new agora. Last but not least, I think the market conversations of tomorrow will involve aggregations of what weblogs are becoming today. Count on it. And here we are.
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