Every now and then, some new big thing changes the way people look at technology. Often, it’s not so much the technology that changes, but rather the way people use what was already there. The revolution isn’t so much technological as it is methodological. Such is certainly the case this time.
The next big thing in internet communication is the blog. It’s a shortened form of the phrase “web log,” which apparently took too long to say. A “web log,” in the classic sense, is nothing more than a personal log (diary or whatever) that’s made accessible over the web. Now, there’s nothing new about that concept–it’s been around as log as the web itself. I’ve been keeping a sort of running online journal of thoughts for ten years now. After all, what else do you put on your personal website.
However, what’s changing the world isn’t so much the practice per se, but rather the rising popularity of tools that make the practice so much easier. That’s where the blog, in the more contemporary sense, comes into play. See, the term blog today seems to be reserved, not just for online journals, but specifically for journals that are managed by a Content Management System (or CMS) that was designed specifically for managing personal pages. The cool thing about a CMS (and, in fact, its reason for existence) is the fact that it makes data entry a lot easier. Creating and managing web content is so much easier with a CMS that you can spend your time writing instead of moving files around.
Now, the concept of a CMS is also not new. They’ve also been around since the beginning of the Internet, but until recently, few people used them on their own homepages. The time and work involved in setting one up was simply too prohibitive. There’s no money to be made in homepages–especially those telling everyone what’s new with your cat–so the home user wasn’t much of a target audience for people designing these things. Progress was slow.
However, once CMS technology took root in the personal home page arena, the results were astounding. Let me go over the major selling points of the average blog.
- Adding a story is fast. You can compose content for your blog as fast as you can compose an email.
- Your audience can participate. Every major blogging package allows readers to supply their own comments in response to your story. Suddenly, the user has a real incentive to write–they know they have an audience, and the audience writes back. It’s like having hundreds of pen-pals.
- Built-in syndication. A technology that is currently gaining popularity is called RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”). It allows your blog to communicate with client software, like mail readers. People don’t have to visit your website to see your latest story–they can read it with their morning email. RSS aggregators are designed to pull content from any number of sources and make them all available in one spot. Not only are blogs easier to write, their easier to read.
So, what has the net effect of the introduction of the blog been? In a nutshell, it’s a decentralization of media sources. When everyone can make their own voice heard, the public starts focusing on those whose story is the most interesting rather than who has the greatest publishing power. People start getting the news from their peers, rather than from traditional media outlets.
Information now comes unfiltered. Whereas the news sources used to get their information “from the experts,” they now consult the experts’ blogs. And in the mean time, the average joe has come to bypass the news outlet, and read the story directly from the source–whether they realize they’re doing so or not! It is a revolution of sorts. Your voice can be heard. And if you have something the world want’s to listen to, it will be.