Pages

Thursday, March 21, 2002


One of today's DailyLinks from elearningpost.com references a FastCompany article All the News that's Fit to Blog by John Ellis.

Ellis' article has a lot of good links. I found one to Rebecca's Pocket, by Rebecca Blood. Her weblogs: a history and pespective is especially worth a look.

In this essay, I found a link to the personal web site/blog of Evan Williams, the president/CEO of Pyra Labs, "the creators and operators of Blogger--the "power" behind many blogs, including this one.

Evan's March 18, 2002 blog post references Microcontent News: The Online Magazine for Weblogs, Webzines, and Personal Publishing (spun off from Corante), by John Hiler. As Evan notes, the introductory article at Microcontent is very good. Most interesting for me was Hiler's take -- based on his reading of Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer -- on the parallels between Personal Computing and Personal Publishing. He tells us:

The Personal Computing revolution was about the democratization of computing: the idea that anyone could have access to the power of a computer, without having to beg, borrow, and steal access to the mainframes and minicomputers owned by major corporations and universities.

The Personal Publishing revolution seems like the inevitable follow-up: the democratization of publishing. It's another Promethean notion: the idea that anyone can start publishing anything to the world, using the Internet. And unlike the dot-com boom and bust, personal publishing is being driven by passionate hobbyists fueled not by greed, but by a burning desire to share their thoughts with the world.

I agree with Hiler when he says that the "Personal Publishing revolution" blogs represent constitutes "nothing less than the birth of an entire new industry," and an exciting one at that!

No comments: