OK, Dave, just step away from the Kool-Aid and nobody gets hurt ...

I told Doc tonight at dinner that I think we're at the cusp of a communication revolution with shifts in power as great as those at the end of the 1980s. [Scripting News]

Isn't this just a little bit over the top? This weblog thing can cut both ways. There are plenty of conservative weblogs out there, some of them pretty well written. And for the moment, weblogs seem to be read and esteemed mainly by other webloggers.

Yes, Howard Dean did a lot with weblogs, but Howard Dean is also headed for being number three on the list of potential Democratic candidates for President (the man is unelectable, period -- he will not carry the states that count most heavily in the Electoral College and I am pretty sure he will not carry the South, Texas, New York, the Northeast outside of New England, or the Great Plains).

I wouldn't count on weblogs destroying The Evil Publishing Empires any time soon, either. Until the software gets to be as brainless to use as a browser, and until people at large figure out that there are these things called weblogs and they figure out how to sort through the hundreds of thousands of them to find the handful that offer value TO THEM INDIVIDUALLY in return for the trouble, it ain't gonna happen.

Maybe more another day this week. I need some sleep.

11:17:47 PM    

Oliver Willis evidently sortakinda had a similar reaction to BloggerCon as mine:

Oliver Willis: Deflating the Blog Bubble. [Scripting News]

It's good to see that not everyone there drank all the Kool-Aid.

10:05:49 PM    

Maybe everybody should not start a weblog.

A lot of people have started weblogging. I think the current numbers are that there are a million plus weblogs active right now. At the same time, there are about two and a half million that have been abandoned. Three or four of them are mine (sorry, Blogger - reliability is important). So a lot of folks have started a weblog and decided it isn't worth the effort, or they don't have anything to say, etc.

This reminds me of the CB Radio craze in the 70's and 80's. Radio Shack and other retailers sold who-knows-how-many CB radios. I still have one in the garage (it doesn't work any more, why am I keeping it?). In the day, you could turn on your CB any time of night or day and listen to chatter on 99 channels. A lot of it was truckers. A lot of it was hookers, looking for truckers. And a lot of it was just people babbling, much like what you can hear now on FRS (Family Radio Service) during the week after Christmas. It isn't that people shouldn't be allowed to broadcast on CB or FRS, it's a free country still and they can do practically any damn thing they want. But ... after a while everybody realizes that it's just babble and transient and there's no value in it for them, so they go away. You can still turn on your CB and hear the truckers and public safety folks using the airwaves for purposes that have value to them. And you still hear a few hookers. But the torrent of commentary on all channels is gone.

So maybe this is where weblogging is headed. We will continue to see a lot of churn and noise, but eventually the ones left weblogging will be the folks who have found some value (not necessarily monetary) in the effort. There will always be a few who log just to be able to read themselves on the Web. There will be some who weblog in order to publish information that others find of value. There will be some who weblog as an easy way to market or to publish an easily updateable web site.

But I have real questions as to whether weblogging will ever have any more significance than that. I am no longer seeing it as a truly disruptive technology, although I am prepared to be wrong about that. I read a lot from the A-list webloggers about how great it is that ANYBODY can be a source of news and ANYBODY can publish -- but they can do that now with a regular webpage. And the fact is that J. Random Blogger is quite likely to be full of crap, just like anybody else. The fact that it was published in a weblog does not make information more reliable.

Time to go do something productive and profitable.

12:24:30 PM