Adam Barr takes to task the insider-y side of the blogosphere's hypocracy in this article posted to kuro5hin:
Back then you had to be able to write pure HTML to put up a site like that. With modern blogging has come authoring tools that free you from that restriction. So is this the huge breakthrough that we've been waiting for since 1993? Of course not. The basic facts remain unchanged: information in a blog is non-selected information, non-selected information has always been around, and it is never going to replace selected information. You can put out all the non-selected information you want, by whatever means you want, and most of it will be ignored. And if you care about sustainable business models, you sure as heck aren't going to build one with non-selected information.The whole article is worth reading in full. It has some excellent links and some great follow-up discussion as well (if you don't mind gossip about Philip Greenspun).
I think Adam may be overlooking the context-building projects, from blogdex and daypop to this new metadata initiative that may at least assist in the selecting and filtering. I do think that human channels of attention will always be the most salient.
I surf blogs as I would surf the web in general, following interesting links. People who often send me on to other valuable stuff get bookmarked or blogrolled and I rely on them for part of my info stream.
So, yes. Blogs tend to be self-published (although Kaus and Alterman do it for publications) and thus "unselected" or "self-selected" but the meta-level of interpretation, through human links and machine aggregation amounts to a layer of selection that can be used the way we might rely on agents, editors, and book reviewers to indicate worthwhile books for us to read.
For example, I just noticed pb's bookwatch, which tracks book mentions in the blogosphere.
categories: memewatch metablog syllabus
2:04:09 PM 
say what []
Rereading Bricklin's Aug 12 article on small business blogging, I realized that his first example is a pretty close fit for the intangibles I get from doing this blog:
One type of small business is the "consultant". This covers a wide range of areas, from engineers, to marketers, to event planners, to freelance writers and designers, and more. Consultants are already very common users of blogs. A normal part of the job of many consultants entails going to meetings and conferences and being active in trade associations where they "network", show off their expertise, appear on panels, etc. A blog is a way of showing your expertise and establishing yourself as a trustworthy authority without doing the travel. The time necessary to maintain the blog comes out of the time that would have been spent at some of the meetings. (A blog is an excellent way to build up your "authority" to move up politically in a trade association, too. Your readers would be others in your field, not customers.)
categories: knowhow metablog syllabus
1:42:29 PM say what []
Believe it or not, I'm still sorting out what I've learned about Traction Software, sifting and trying to digest what I've learned. Traction was heavily influenced by Doug Engelbart and his ideas about
Our Journal system was conceived by this author in about 1966. I wanted an underlying operational process, for use by individuals and groups, that would help bring order into the time stream of the Augmented Knowledge workers. The term "journal" emerged early in the conceptualization process for two reasons:I'm still exploring this vein, but it occurred to me that I also ought to link to one of best recognized seminal works that envisioned the hyperlinked electronic knowledge space we are all building today, Vannevar Bush's 1945 Atlantic Monthly article, "As We May Think":
- I felt it important in many dynamic operations to keep a log (sometimes termed a "journal") that chronicles events by means of a series of unchangeable entries (for instance, to log significant events while evolving a Plan, shaping up a project, trouble-shooting a large operation. or monitoring on-going operations). These entries would be preserved in original form, serving as the grist for later integration into more organized treatments.
- I also wanted something that would serve essentially the same recorded-dialogue purpose as I perceived a professional journal (plus library) to do.
The human mind ... operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.
...
Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails.We are still only documenting our "trails" in ad hoc ways, but it's astonishing how clearly Vannevar Bush was able to see ahead.
I'll post more specifically about Traction Software when I have my thoughts ordered.
categories: knowhow memewatch metablog syllabus
10:32:28 AM say what []
