I can’t make it to Dave’s Thursday meeting tonight, so I figured I’d try to post something to this blog just to show that I’m still paying attention.

One of the questions that people keep asking is “what’s so special about this blog thing”? What makes blogs different from Usenet, or mailing lists, or GeoCities home pages, or Slashdot? Are blogs really a new phenomenon, or merely the latest in a long line of new-media buzzwords?

The answer is that blogs are a better way of organizing the Web. Many Web sites are organized primarily by topic. (To read about moving pictures, visit the IMDB. To read about pictures which stand still, visit photo.net.) Mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups are also organized by topic. But blogs are organized primarily by author, which makes more sense, because your life is built around people, not topics. Good writing comes from good writers - it doesn’t matter what they are writing about. Good teaching comes from good teachers. In high school and college, when one gets to choose one’s classes, the most important thing to do is focus on the teachers: find the best lecturers you can and take everything they offer, no matter what the subject.

Blogs are also important because they are systematic. Each piece of writing is labeled with an author, and a date, and sometimes even a topic. The writing is easier to syndicate, easier to index, and easier to search in different ways.

It’s possible to make other online forums resemble the Blogosphere, but not in a satisfying way. Google Groups can sort Usenet by author, and Slashdot can do the same for its posts. But this is a bit painful, and you might not want to do it every day for each of your 30 favorite writers. And newsgroup postings have a special problem: they are meant to be read in the context of a big thread, so to understand what they’re talking about you usually need to see the rest of the thread. Bloggers, on the other hand, write for their own medium - the good ones either make entries that are self-contained, or include links to the other entries that they are commenting on.

Gotta run. The rest of life is catching up to me.