Homo Linux Sapiens 8/30

Up to now, I've only known Bruce Sterling as the co-author of The Difference Engine, and because that book sucked I confess I've always suspected that Sterling may have been the reason (Gibson's later solo work has been excellent). Last night, after reading Sterling's presentation on open source programming, the dominance of Microsoft, and what should be done with spammers, I realize my error. Sterling is a very smart man and a very good speaker.

When Sterling explains how and why Microsoft has evolved from being a benign entity into a dark, monolithic fortress of paranoia and hostility he justifies the intuitive repulsion I feel toward PCs and Windows: It isn't the machines and it isn't the software, it's the "Windows is installing 9 million files into your system folder for various reasons, some of which you don't need to know about" thing. If for nothing else, read Sterling's remarks about Linux.

Whither Goest Blogging

Perhaps this part should be titled, "Raven's Perch" or something, but that seems all too cute. Regardless, if you've visited Userland's community server you may have noticed that the numbers of page reads are about ten times larger than they are on Salonblogs. Let's look at the top three over there since October 2001:

431,729: safersex.org
375,403: Usernum 1014
374,359: Web Pages That Suck - Examples of Bad Web Design

Now, over on the daily list:

1,870: Tara Grubb For Congress Radio Weblog
1,239: safersex.org
283: Der Schockwellenreiter
269: Usernum 1014
240: Ray Ozzie's Weblog
174: mesh on MX
165: Web Pages That Suck - Examples of Bad Web Design
  

This suggests to me that there is a tremendous advantage to being an early weblog and that with each passing month it will become increasingly difficult for new bloggers to participate. In other words, it isn't the weblog that is meaningful, it's the functioning of Updated Pages and Ranking by Page-Reads that forms a community. What's going to happen when the above numbers increase by a factor of 10? Are we going to start seeing pages titled, "Britney Sex Pictures Here," "John's Page Sux," and so forth? How are people going to distinguish themselves from background noise?

This is the point someone steps up and says, "You forgot about webrings, dude." Well, let's see. Over at their directory I type in "English usage" and get zero hits. I try "English" and behold a gazillion webrings subdivided down to categories like "English dogs, Corgi" and so on. This looks like a party that ended years ago.

So we have blogrolling, and cross-feeding, and multi-pages, as ideas in progress. This thinking appears to be more of a quantitative solution, no? And let's not forget that where this many eyeballs are involved, the corporations are soon to follow. You know as well as I do that some spikey-haired little bastard is telling the suits about how oh-so-exciting this is and how a celebrity weblog can be ghost written by a top-notch writing team and how there's room for the Coke logo right down there...