Blog about my Linux 1495

You're missing the point.

Blogs aren't a new thing, though too many forget or never knew.

Forty years ago, a group that left the San Francisco Mime Troupe were using a mimeograph machine for broadsides and then near instant publishing in San Francisco. Not just publishing announcements of coming events, or reporst on what had happened, but even printing as things were happening, as instant as you can get with a centralized printing press.

One thing they published was Richard Brautigan's "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace". While I can find no connection, Lee Felsenstein used "Loving Grace" as a company name in connection with Community Memory in Berkely in 1974 (first public access computer bulletin board, run off a mainframe that had come from SAIL), and then used it in his company name when he designed the Pennywhistle modem (published in 1976), the Processor Technology SOL computer (also 1976) and the Osborne 1 computer. And he clearly has stated he used the name because of the poem.

But then a couple of years ago, I met the granddaughters of Fred Pohl and Judith Merill, who were both part of the Golden Age of science fiction starting in the late thirties. And so many involved in science fiction had fanzines, which are in a sense the forerunners of blogs. As Judith Merill said in her autobiography, back then there was no real difference between readers and writers, since they all were both, or wanted to be. And in meeting the granddaughters, I suddenly realized the group in San Francisco had to be influenced by science fiction zines, since one of those involved, Chester Anderson, had written some science fiction (that had been published).

Those were my models a decade ago when I started with the newsgroup. Here's the printing press that I'd been waiting for for decades, so there is lots one can do with it. I can look up some of my posts from 1996, and they were "blogging", ie writing up something out in the public realm as soon as I got home, before the term had originated.

The problem with blogging today is that too few remember or know of such predecessors. They likely don't even grasp that the reason blogs are set up the way they are, ie latest entry at the top, is because then one doesn't have to wait for the full page to load to see if there's a new entry. And instead of content driving them, ie nobody was talking about the Montreal Fringe Festival back in 1996 online so I did it, too many are doing it because they can, because it's become socially respectable, because it's something their friends are doing. It's become easy for them to do it, with some branded internet site (even though most ISPs include webspace as part of the basic package).

And then they lose their power, because instead of sharing important things, their only content is the really trivial. Or news that has already travelled far already. We see that latter in the newsgroups, pick a Big Enough Event and in all kinds of newsgroups people will forward some story from old media, as if we haven't already heard it from old media already.

So no, having a blog means nothing in itself because it's just a different way of publishing something. If it's drivel, then of course it's drivel whether it's a newsgroup posting, a guy standing by the side of a road pbutting out his broadside, or on a blog. But if the content is worthwhile, then the means of publishing means nothing.

Michael