Salon: Use the blog, Luke. Scott Johnson. It's about information management. The bloggers have the potential to do something far more original than offer up packaged opinions on the news of the day; they can actually help organize the Web in ways tailored to your minute-by-minute needs. [Tomalak's Realm]

Some clips:

But the debate is a false one. What makes blogs interesting is precisely the way in which they're not journalism....But the debate is a false one. What makes blogs interesting is precisely the way in which they're not journalism. Sure, if more writers can follow in Sullivan's wake and turn their blogs into revenue-generating enterprises, blogs will certainly mark a qualitative change as far as the underlying economics go. (Effectively it will mean that bloggers have a new, usually modest revenue stream to supplement what they take home from their day jobs.) But the journalistic form itself won't be all that earth-shattering, certainly no more revolutionary than the first-generation Web zines, which were often staffed like old-style print magazines, but sported hypertext, multimedia and genuine community interaction alongside those traditional mastheads.

...

But both Blogdex and Bookwatch share a conceptual limitation with most individual blogs, a limitation that is hard-wired into the software used by the great majority of webloggers: They are organized around time...The beautiful thing about most information captured by the bloggers is that it has an extensive shelf life. The problem is that it's being featured on a rotating shelf.

Johnson offers a number of intriguing design suggestions that dovetail with the recent discusions around backlinking in weblogs. Jenny has also been thinking about Johnson's comments and blogspace.

Besides the backlinking tools, the Watson tool developd at the Intelligent Information Lab should also be folded into this debate

3:57:27 PM •  • comment  

The Guardian.  Great article on Rageboy.  Communities of interest is what the Web is all about.  Get the publishing and collaboration tools in the hands of the people actually making the news -- using the products -- building the products -- etc. and see what happens.  [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

Some key clips:

...Locke's message is that the internet is not a mass medium, so mass marketing and advertising based on the old, broadcast model are counterproductive. All those internet business plans based on "aggregating eyeballs" are doomed to fail. The web is not print, and it's not becoming television...

"The broadcast model is command and control: from the inside it's work orders come from the top, check your brain at the door, shut up and do what you're told," he adds. "With respect to the outside, it's: 'Buy our fabulous product, do it today!' But it's the same voice of command and control: "You're going to do what we tell you.' And the internet just goes against that whole thing.

"My idea was areas of interest - this is what I've been preaching forever. Internet audiences aggregate by areas of interest, not top down but bottom up. What would pay for it was the opportunity for corporations to attach themselves to areas of interest, and not only keep them afloat with money, but participate with those audiences in a meaningful way."

Although the style annoys me, I still find the message in The Cluetrain Manifesto and from Locke in general more insightlful than the vast majority of what I encounter written about the web. More recently, David Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web is another effort to examine the web on its own terms rather than trying to force it into a technological extension of the status quo.

How the technology is designed does matter. Strategy decisions are not independent of technological ones.

3:14:09 PM •  • comment