I encourage all those interested in the weblogs, those who think weblogs offer no value, and those wanting to publish better weblogs to read John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid's paper, The Social Life of Documents. It's from 1995, but oh-so-relevant. Among the choice insights, is this:
Indeed, the "link to a wired news article and a snarky comment" offers (potentially) much more value than it has been given credit for, if you consider that the way a news story or other content is interpreted is as important (or more so) than the content itself and that weblogs are a perfect medium by which to gain insights (e.g., "that's total b.s.") into that content from a wide array of independent, unbiased, and often more knowledgeable peers.
Of course, I'm of the opinion that weblogs are much more than the link and the comment (some are much less). I don't like the definitions that reduce them to that. I'm all for a much-less-restricting definition that focuses more on the format than the content. But I won't go too far into that now, because I'm still trying to figure most of this stuff out myself.
Marginal notes, footnotes, and conventional commentaries are merely the clearest examples of the ways that writing continually provokes more writing and that texts provide context for each other. ...we are always commenting on texts, which continually intertwine in a process grandly known as "intertextuality." Documents are not, then, independent. Like biological organisms, every document is always related to some other.
Indeed, writing on writing is both literally and metaphorically an important part of the way meaning is negotiated. Annotation is a rich cultural practice which helps, if only by the density of comment attached, to signify the different cultural importance of texts and parts of texts.
Indeed, the "link to a wired news article and a snarky comment" offers (potentially) much more value than it has been given credit for, if you consider that the way a news story or other content is interpreted is as important (or more so) than the content itself and that weblogs are a perfect medium by which to gain insights (e.g., "that's total b.s.") into that content from a wide array of independent, unbiased, and often more knowledgeable peers.
Of course, I'm of the opinion that weblogs are much more than the link and the comment (some are much less). I don't like the definitions that reduce them to that. I'm all for a much-less-restricting definition that focuses more on the format than the content. But I won't go too far into that now, because I'm still trying to figure most of this stuff out myself.