I’m preparing a presentation on blogs and RSS for our next staff meeting at work, and I thought I’d talk a little about what I’ve found and what I think.

Most of the people I work with are familiar with blogs to varying degrees. A few people regularly read at least one (Kos, Drudge, The Virtual Chase, etc.), but I don’t think anyone (besides me) has one. And beyond that, I don’t think there’s a good understanding or discussion of how our department (which does internal and external communications) is going to respond to the unavoidable rise to prominence blogs have recently enjoyed. I don’t have the answer to that, nor do I think does anybody in the PR/communications/advertising/journalism world. But blogs have revolutionized the way people communicate, and that change is something that can’t be denied or ignored.

So, to begin with, let me contradict myself. Blogs are not what has revolutionized the way we communicate. That revolution began long ago, and it’s origins can be traced back as far as you car to look (TV, radio, telegraph, etc.). But, essentially, it’s the Internet that has revolutionized communication. Everybody has always known this, and always known it would (even back when I owned my first modem for the Mac it was called “Global Village” an allusion to Marshall McLuhan’s theories of modern, global communication).

It’s popular right now to say that blogs are something new and different. Bloggers, in particular, like to set rules about what is and is not a blog. Some say it’s only a blog if it’s updated frequently; others say if there’s any editorial oversight, it’s not a blog. I disagree.

A blog is just a Web site with a catchier name that doesn’t require weird capitalization. That’s it. Just a Web site. Those blog critics who complain about blogs being no better than the mid 90s AOL personal home pages with pictures of people’s cats and flashing GIFs are right. The early Internet was flooded with boring, ill-executed, pointless pages about people’s pets, their kids, their guitars, and even more dorky topics. But in my view, all those pages were blogs.

The only difference between the blogs we read today and the ones we didn’t read in 1995 is that today’s blogs are much, much easier to create. In 1995 creating a Web page (which I use interchangeably with ‘blog’) was a complicated ordeal. You had to know HTML (and most likely you actually had to hand code it, rather than using a WYSIWYG editor)). You had to some Web space, which was remarkably confusing and difficult to get a hold of, unless you were a) a student at a university or b) a geek (and I say geek in the most loving way).

Most people, alas, were either not students or not sufficiently geeks to be able to put together a Web page. So the few personal pages that did exist weren’t very good, or didn’t appeal to an audience, or both.

Today, everything about creating a Web page has changed. Sure, knowing a little HTML still helps, but so does knowing how to speak English in Miami. But the fact is, you can get by just fine without it. Web space, which used to be not only expensive but also confusing (the DNS server’s connected to the … domain name!) is now free and easy. Blogger or a host of other, um, hosting services, will just give it to you. In fact, they’re practically begging to give away Web space. If you want fancier duds (like your own domain name and no ads) you’ll have to shell out a few bucks, but I literally mean a few bucks (my hosting service, Bloghosts, provides excellent support, a great administrative interface, a bunch of email addresses, and 100 megabytes of space for about $3 a month).

So now, setting up a Web site where you can post pictures of your cat, stories about your cat, and even audio clips of your cat is FREE, and it takes just minutes. So, of course, there are a million blogs/websites about people’s cats, and nobody reads them, and nobody updates them, and they are a waste of space and time and even the words I using to write about them.

BUT! But, ever since publishing content on the Internet became easy and free and fast, the cat sites have been joined by hundreds of thousands of sites published by people with real, expert knowledge and honest opinions about what they are writing. Lawyers, doctors, politicians, writers, PR people, small business owners, airplane enthusiasts, cartography geeks. They’re all out there creating good, useful content on a regular basis. People who ten years ago were holed up in their basement designing dot-matrix printers out of Lego’s are now posting their design specs online. You can debate the usefulness of a dot-matrix printer made of Lego’s that uses chocolate for ink, but you can’t argue that it isn’t interesting. And I firmly believe it’s better to have that knowledge out in the open where it can be shared and revised and improved upon, than to have it trapped in some brilliant geek chocolate-lover’s mind.

It turned out that the Internet was not about technology or computers; it was about publishing. It was the next logical step in a series of refinements to human mass communication that has been in the works since Guttenberg pressed the first “In the beginning” into his first bible. Reaching a mass audience (or, in my case, a small but devoted (I hope) audience) is no longer a capacity reserved for those with power or money or very, very loud voices. Creating a Web site is no longer the exclusive domain of geeks and nerds and computer geeks (wait, did I say geeks already?). Anyone can do create one, we just call them blogs instead of Web sites.

Combine that with the power of RSS (which is just a way of standardizing the content on these blogs/websites so that they can be more easily read, searched and republished) and you’ve got an ever expanding, incredibly diverse, and widely accessible representation of humanity’s collective knowledge. If you learn to search it, filter out the good stuff from the bad, and monitor it for changing trends and currents, and your own consciousness becomes vastly enriched and augmented.

The next step, then, is not only to feed from the great pool of human knowledge which is accumulating on the Internet, but to contribute to it. It’s your way of getting your message out there, of communicating it to people who very likely not only are interested in hearing it, but also probably searched to find something exactly like it. I keep telling my uncle, who knows a lot about wine, that he should start a blog/website about that frosty beverage. He could help inform people that wine is not meant to be frosty when consumed, and that most likely those who call wine a frosty beverage are confusing it with beer, which is a malt alcohol and has not at all the same flavor or appearance as wine. Idiot.

My dad (although I don’t like to admit it) is something of an expert in the field of medicine and medical education. I’m sure there are hundreds of people out there who would love to read what he has to say about health insurance, teaching hospitals, residency programs and the like.

I could go on and on, but the point is, everybody’s an expert on something. And even those who aren’t (like me) are still qualified to write about whatever interests them. Because after all, if it’s interesting to you, it’s certain to be interesting to someone else, too.

Unless it’s about your cat. There’s just no audience for sites about cats anymore. None.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 10th, 2004 at 9:50 am and is filed under Blogging, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.