I don't really understand the point of Brendan O'Neill's essay arguing against the significance of weblogs. [Davos Newbies]

At the time that Gutenberg made his printing press, the impact was not immediate. Literacy was a rare skill to have, but what his tool did was give the masses the ability to have what were painstakingly coded texts in their homes, even the homes of the middle class of that society.

It took time for his device to have an effect becasue not enough people knew how to read, and not enough people knew how to operate his press. Contrast this with now, when most people can operate a word processor as well as email, so they can easily set up and maintain a weblog. The adoption curve on this is much steeper, as the barrier to entry (computer, internet access) is something that most interested parties already have.

What do weblogs do? They give people who have a passion for a subject a means of easily setting up and maintaining a website, no need to hand code the HTML (writing out long hand), and when combined with news aggregators, they can now see all the pamphlets (I think my publishing metaphor just ripped) that any of the other webloggers are putting out.

8:45:03 AM