Honoring Wired's Patron Saint. The life of intellectual icon Marshall McLuhan is celebrated in a new documentary that profiles the colorful life and prescient ideas of the 'oracle of the electric age.' A review by Noah Shachtman. [Wired News]

Quoting from the above...

"McLuhan begins with the premise that the tools people create in turn shape us. The most powerful tools are those that help convey ideas, like language. To McLuhan, modern life was like a "global village," where everyone becomes aware of all news at once."

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I think that the emergence of blogging tools is going to change the way in which we use and relate to the web.  As other people have commented the web is largely a read-only medium today.  Few people have the power to publish what they think.  The simplicity of tools such as Radio and Blogger combined with the enthusiam they seem to generate is going to change all that.  In revolutionary terms, I see blogging to the web as XML/SOAP is to EDI.

But that's not the end of the story.  If a blog was just a way for everyone to decrease the signal to noise ratio of the web it wouldn't be so exciting.

What turns blogging from another fad into a real tool for building and changing communities is that you can let people comment on your postings (as I have done on mine).  I think this will be a very powerful concept and it will be interesting to see how people will deal with it -- but I believe this is the key to enabling communities to form around shared ideas.

One reminaing problem though is how people are going to come together to form these communities.  I am still not sure...  how do we find each other in this brave new electronic world?

"...the tools people create in turn shape us." 

I look forward to receiving my first comment, good or bad...