A blog is really nothing more than a blank piece of paper. It is a collection of useless things. It is random and senseless. A blog is just a place to keep track of stuff, and write words. It is a place. It is a lump of nothing.
Blogs don’t matter any more than paper. Does paper by itself matter? Not really. It has some value but not the kind of value most people talk about; value as defined by people who read and write blogs.
So, if blogs have little value in the Paper Sense, then why do people care about blogs? There are two answers. One is obvious and one is not. The obvious answer is that there are humans running blogs. In other words, humans generate news, capture ideas, post pictures, tell stories, and much more via blogs. Therefore, blogs have value in the Human Sense but not in the Paper Sense.
This distinction is very important if you want to talk about the lasting power of blogs. Why are blogs popular? Are they popular like paper? No. They are popular because of the human value. They are valuable when other people consume them. You read a blog because it has Human Value (or perhaps Economic Value or Social Value) but not Paper Value.
But hold on. There is another reason blogs don’t matter the way you think they do. How are blogs generated, created, and manipulated? This is not a trivial matter.
Hold on while I make some comments. The web is great and the web is popular because it is easy to search for information (in most cases). When people search for information they seek to consume information (i.e., read) or act (e.g., purchase a book at Amazon). This is one reason why the web is popular, and why it took off. But, perhaps more importantly, the web became popular because it was easy to create web pages. HTML is magic, baby. Easy to read, understand, and do.
Here is where we get to the second point. Blogs don’t matter. Blogs are like paper. They don’t count until a human adds value. How does a human add value to a blog? Through blog software. This is critical. HTML is magic and so is blog software.
Think about it. Before blog software, known in some cases as Content Management Software (CMS), were blogs popular? Not really. This isn’t a small point, folks. HTML made the web grow like crazy and now we are seeing how blog software is making blogging grow. Blogs don’t matter. People matter, and blogging software matters.
So, what does this mean? Well, if you find a way to make it easier for people to communicate via the internet (on web pages or some similar medium) then that will make HTML and blogging software less important. (There are other implications too!) At a minimum, the buzz will fade.
Let me summarize some thoughts. HTML made the web easy. Stuff was easy to find too. Then, blogging came along but it was sort of a pain because it was manual. Only hardcore bloggers were doing it. (Like me.) Then, blogging software came along (e.g., Greymatter, Blogger, Radio, Movable Type), and that sort of killed hand coding. Sure, some people still hand code their blogs, or use Front Page, or some other tool, but blogging software dominates now. The software matters, and so do the people writing the blog software and the people writing content for the blogs. But blogs themselves are just blogs. They’re just paper. They just sit in the corner. Blogs don’t matter. They have no inherent value.
Note: Thanks to Daniel Szuc for the inspiration behind this rant.
p.s. Blogging software matters. Why else did Google buy Blogger? Why else did Six Apart (Movable Type) grow from two people to twenty four in one year? Software baby, software. The tools behind the blogs matter. They really matter.
p.p.s. I think it is interesting that people haven’t talked much about Blogger and Google. It happened, was big news, then faded. What is Google up to? They don’t exactly go around buying companies. Also, notice that they bought technolgy not content. They get content for free via web sites, including blogs. Like other smart technical companies they are focusing on infrastruture versus content. Content flows but the infrastructure (software) guides the flow. That’s a lesson folks!
