Shedding Light on the Burrows of Blog
--for my nonblogger friends who might be checking this site:

There is a great article about Meg Hourihan who was one of the founders of what became blogger.com. This is how the article explains the original idea for a "weblog" or "blog":

A blog consists primarily of links to other Web sites and commentary about those links. Having a blog is rather like publishing your own, on-line version of Reader's Digest, with daily updates: you troll the Internet, and, when you find an article or a Web site that grabs you, you link to it -- or, in weblog parlance, you "blog" it. Then other people who have blogs -- they are known as bloggers -- read your blog, and if they like it they blog your blog on their own blog...... Most of the new blogs are, like Megnut, intimate narrative rather than digests of links and commentary; to read them is to enter a world in which the personal lives of participants have become a part of the public domain....

There also is a partial transcript of a panel "Journalisms New Life Forms" that provides answers to questions that many traditional news purveyors and news consumers ask about the value of using weblogs for disseminating news. One of the comments I like is one offered by Rusty Foster, founder of Kuro5hin: In the early American colonies...all the newspapers were essentially Weblogs -- paper Weblogs. They were one guy working in his basement and printing out new editions whenever he had something to say. There is a kind of full circle evolution going on here.

One nation, under blog.

These Young Whippersnappers!
Anita Bora posts a link to this interesting story about a young former CEO who takes a McDonald's counter job and then writes an essay about it that winds up being widely circulated on the web.

I find what all of these young techies are doing really unbelievable. They take risks that my generation would never even consider, and I am intrigued by all of their energy and daring. In many cases, they don't have families to support, so they can take the gambles of experimenting with the commercial possibilities of technology and then wandering off to do something like work at McDonald's. It's such a different world from my twenty-something era.

It is a brave new world, but in a much more exciting and positive way then that phrase originally meant. Now if only my son could find place in it that would pay his bills........