Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog

Although many people seem to detest it, I like Dave Winer’s blog. He’s a scrappy, techno-savvy, surly person who speaks from behind the scenes and is uncannily accurate. He’s also been blogging since the early days of Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom, a blog I’ve read for at least a decade. (Update: I don’t agree with his politics that adorn the top of the page, but Jorn is a genius and his idiosyncrasies should be tolerated.)

Dave sounds like someone I would like to meet. He believes in minimal technology, as I do, although in different ways. And his insight cuts through a lot of the loose phlegm of public discourse. Here he is on blogjournalism:

In 1997 if you told someone the functions of Vignette could be provided to millions of people virtually for free they wouldn’t have believed you. (This is factual btw, I did, and wasn’t believed.)

They also thought syndication would be done by the big publishing companies, something unweildy called ICE. We thought it should be simpler so that anyone could support it on both ends, and we won. The journalists have no record of this probably because they believed the big companies behind ICE and ignored the low-tech stuff. ^{^}

As usual, established interests start relying on one method of doing things so much they forget about other possibilities. I think Dave probably wanted to bring in the greatest parallel ever, which is the personal computer. Back in the 1970s, it was assumed that computers would always need machine rooms and staffs to monitor them, including highly-trained programmers. As operating systems and programming languages both grew up, and got oversimplified, the computer migrated into the home.

Enter the hobbyist programmer. The personal computer software, like the blog versus a system like Vignette, was a shallow competitor because it was simpler and less reliable, lacking the thorough architecture of mainframe software. But it did the job well enough, and people could by having a computer in the office, have a greater amount of control over their data. So they took their dollars and bought IBM PCs, Apple ][s, Tandy TRS-80s, and Commodore 64s.

Blogs are the same way, and I sense the situation is evening out. The medium has changed; the skill of journalism has not. As Winer opines in another post:

Software design, if you're creating wholly new products, is like haiku. Find the smallest subset of a mature product that will attract people and ship it.

He's right. If you take some existing thing, strip it down the basics, and make it more accessible to the widest margin of the decision-makers and power users, you're going to see it sell quite well. That's why a 5mhz IBM PC outsold much more powerful mainframes, and even some smaller brands that were arguably better-engineered.

Taking a final look at what Scott Karp wrote,

On the face of it, the question of whether blogs can do journalism is absurd — like asking whether sites published on Vignette can do journalism.

[deletia]

So it would seem the answer to the question is an emphatic YES — IF the blog CMS is used by a journalist. ^{^}

We can quibble over what a “journalist” is, but to my mind a journalist is someone who knows the skill of journalism, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re writing it on a napkin, spraypainting it on a wall, publishing it in a newspaper or blogging it into the ether. Jorn Barger and Dave Winer are arguably as influential as the New York Times or Wired magazine in certain sectors of the tech industry, and that reflects their role and skill more than their medium, which just happens to be a lot more convenient than dead trees newspapers.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.