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October 1, 2003
A World of Broadcasters?
Posted by Seb Paquet
Richard MacManus asks,
why would normal people want to publish to the Web? Accurate observations in there. I honestly believe blogging as we currently know it will never become mainstream. The reason is that it is a poor fit for anyone who isn't the (hyper)text-driven, infovore kind of person.
However, that doesn't mean that the more general practice of
broadcasting information of personal relevance will not become mainstream. My vision of the future in this respect is closest to what
Marc Canter's been pushing under the moniker of "digital lifestyle aggregator"; this also seems to be where
Meg Hourihan is heading with the
Lafayette project.
Think about restaurant/show reviews, recipes, pictures. The Web is already full of user-contributed stuff like that; most of it currently resides on
centralized sites like Amazon. The individuals who help build those sites do so most of the time with no reward other than a high local profile that is generally
non-transferable (how many Amazon reviewers are on your blogroll?). I'm willing to bet that many of them would prefer keeping control over their contributions and putting
themselves at the center of their content if systems were available that made that easy.
Comments (3)
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1. reed on October 6, 2003 9:28 AM writes...
The web will die if regular people can't publish.
Yes, even if it is just a picture of your cat.
It will become television. The home-shopping channel, mainly.
It would be really nice if I could put a review on amazon.com which is actually just transclusion from my own web space running on my own computer in my own home, with a permanent URL. Maybe I have all kinds of neat tools running there to manage it.
This is how I envision the ideal web working.
But I don't yet have an idea on how to implement it so that it works and people use it!
(There is a company developing a little application to help you run a personal webserver at home, but I forget the name...)
Permalink to Comment2. Stowe Boyd on October 7, 2003 3:06 PM writes...
The dichotomy between an Amazon review and one's own blog is a reflection of digital reputation being spread all over the place.
What would be really helpful would be a system that collects and colates all the scraps and snippets of writing and commentary that folks leave behind them on the social web, so that these can be related together in some useful way.
We have ten thousand islands where insights and observations (like this comment) are written, perhaps read by others, and then lost in the fog of the web.
Permalink to Comment3. Shows on TV on April 28, 2004 2:24 AM writes...
Blogging is already mainstream... the weatherman is doing it... the local pet strore is doing... hell - I'm even doing it.
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