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One Newbie's Take on ManilaA quick search on Altavista finds 9,178 pages containing the word weblog. To put this in perspective, it finds 1,020,690 that contain the word portal. In other words, weblogs have a way to go. But the fire is catching fast; and nobody is doing a better job of setting that fire than Dave Winer and his cohorts working on Manila. Still, it's all new: three imptyseconds past the Big Bang. So we're still working on the easy parts of the periodic table. No heavy elements yet, and certainly no rocks, planets, stars or galaxies. In other words, a good time to get started. I stumbled on the weblog concept a bit earlier than my Cluetrian cohorts, probably because a) I'm buddies with Dave; and b) I work in the Linux world, where most conversational fires start in Slashdot, Linux Today or one of the many other 'blogs that are primary sources for news about what's happening right now. Another measure of newness: until I write the piece that explains it, few in the Linux community will even know that highly personal alive-all-the-time news services like Slashdot and Linux Today are in fact weblogs. Which is why this very weblog began with an email to my cohorts a couple weeks ago. That email still serves as a pretty good introduction, I think. So here it is, in somewhat edited form:
Guys, A Weblog is basically a news site: a "log" of current matters the author finds interesting. Behind it is software that makes it easy to add content from any browser on the Web. Or some kind of hack that makes it nearly as easy. Think of it as webtop news publishing —with no intermediaries, no bureaucracy, no organization, and nothing to come between lung and lips, including client software. In other words, an instrument of that thing Cluetrain alone obsesses about: voice. Weblogs are highly conversational, and very much a native creature of the new Agora. Which is why I think a weblog would be an ideal way to bring fresh life to the Cluetrain site: a firelplace into which we and our constituency can throw conversational logs. The reference sectionWeblogs: Examples: — Doc Searls, November 28, 1999
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