Domain Registration Related News
About blogs and wikis
March 2004
The current excitement over blogs is curious,
since they amount to little more than personal Web
pages. Although a standard history of blogging
dates the phenomenon to 1997, the key attributes
of the blog - a page of selected links and
comments in reverse chronological order - can be
found as far back as June 1993 on the NCSA What's
New site, one of the most popular destinations of
the nascent Web world.
In those days, such a constantly-updated page was
enormously useful, since it could aspire to
provide links to almost all of the new Web sites
as they came online. Today, blogs necessarily
offer only a partial view of the vastly greater
resources now available. This, of course, is their
strength: they represent a very personal filter of
the otherwise overwhelming data deluge.
One of the best examples of this classic blog is
also one of the earliest. Dave Winer, a software
industry veteran and co-developer of one of the
first blogging software tools, has been producing
his blog Scripting News since April 1997. Another
of his sites shows new blogs, but the number is
now so great that its simple listing is no longer
useful. Today there are as many blogs as there
were Web pages a few years ago; this has led to
the rise of a range of blog search engines.
One of the best is Technorati, which keeps tabs on
nearly 2 million blogs. Useful features include
NewsTalk, the news items currently being talked
about in blogs (a similar service is provided by
Blogdex) and a list of the top 100 blogs based on
cross- references - a kind of Google for blogs.
Such links - formalised as blogrolling - have
become one of the defining features of current
blogs, to the extent that the entire blogosphere
is becoming dangerously self-referential.
In an online world where bloggers' frenzied mutual
promotion seems increasingly the norm, the Wiki
emerges as an oasis of dignified restraint. It was
invented in 1995 by Ward Cunningham, who now works
for Microsoft. But the underlying idea of the Wiki
- a Web page that anyone can edit or even delete -
could hardly be more antithetical to the Redmond
way. In a sense, the Wiki is to the blog what open
source is to proprietary software: a communal
effort where group dynamics rather than a leader's
fiat determine the end-result.
|