I met with Oscar Kneppers today in Amsterdam. Oscar is a very smart guy, and the founder of several magazines, among which some great Mac and online publications. Oscar's been 'out of the running' for almost a year due to a cycling accident. In my feeble attempt to bring him up to speed something interesting came out: Most all weblog software developers build their software around some basic concepts of WhatMakesAWeblogAWeblog. I didn't go into any detail about RSS and trackback, or permalinks, blog-pings etc, because all these formats and protocols on each individual platform work together to create a global content management system. Each node (weblog) becomes a part of a broadcast (posting) when links are created. These are both in html and more importantly, xml under the hood. Being a publisher, I had to take Oscar one step further. There's no chief editor at the end of the process.
He grapsed it quickly though; the only way to create a wide reach of your information is by creating the most relevant information.
Posting quality information (content, whatever) on a particular topic will get you top listing on Google, which gets you links, which in turn introduces you into new information networks layered on top of the net by interconnected weblogs.
As I said a year ago, Links are the currency of the internet. In many ways this is completely democratic. No amount of money or political influence can grow your network, only quality and frquency matter. Size is so eighties :)
5:42:01 PM
I was sooo happy that Apple released iSync1.1 that is supposed to work with my new Nokia 3650. Which is does, only not completely as advertised: iCal doesn't sync with the contacts database (yet). In fact the calendar sync options are greyed out. Bummer.
5:11:17 PM
