The Doc Searls Weblog : Thursday, October 17, 2002

"What we have going for us with blogs is a different kind of familiarity with the people we read. We also have the opportunity to fact-check the crap out out of each other, and watch Google put it all on its public record -- something the big pubs deny by locking up their goods after a day or a week on the Web.

"Here in blogland here is also a very different sense of the first person plural, of we. This is a social place, a public market, full of gossip and noise and the sounds of vendors selling, customers arguing and the various breeds of Socrates and Pythagoras, teaching.

"We get to be real here, whatever that means. And maybe we're still finding that out, too.

"And, like the Agora in Athens, nobody owns or dominates the conversation. Not even Microsoft. Maybe not even Google.

"We can even say no to the hemlock."

But have we really found authenticity, or is the weblog just another form of artfulness, the more so because it appears to be artless?

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