January 07, 2006

Its A Fine Art, and Difficult To Master, But As Tim Bray Once Said:

A blogosphere without arguments would be a poor, thin, boring place.

With this in mind I am happy to see Dare has crossed off item #4 from his New Years Reslution list:

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - New Year Resolutions

Piss of Less People with my Writing: Whatever. I've already gotten two angry emails from different folks at work about stuff I've written online and it isn't even the first week of the year. Maybe next year. ;)

'Blogging' has brought about an amazing way for us to communicate and as such, argue our viewpoints with anyone who care's to 'listen' and/or join-in. Before Tim Berners-Lee gave us both his vision and his code, labeling the combined result the 'WorldWide Web', none-of-this would have been possible. While he may not not have 'invented' blogging per se, as he recently pointed out:

In 1989 one of the main objectives of the WWW was to be a space for sharing information. It seemed evident that it should be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute. The first browser was actually a browser/editor, which allowed one to edit any page, and save it back to the web if one had access rights.

To any half-way informed geek [2] its obvious there is no technical difference between posting an entry to a personal blog and publishing an article on a personal web-site. The tools are different (kinda') and the fact that the term 'Weblog' and its general definition [3] have helped promote the idea that publishing on the web requires little more than access to a computer and the ability to grasp the general concept of typing text into a box and pushing a button to make that text automagically be converted to ('HTML' || 'XHTML' || 'Other Markup'), posted to a ('blog' || 'web site' || 'web page'), and added to an XML data feed such that others can 'subscribe' to your data feed, pinging it from time-to-time to see if anything new is available.

The semantics and delivery mechanisms are a bit different. But I'm trying to think....

How does ('read/write web' || 'web 2.0' || 'other similar cliche marketing term hackers tend to hate but can't do much about it as we need the marketing-types money for our own survival (physical and career)') differ from that in which Tim Berners-Lee envisioned since day one?

Hmmm... Guess Tim was write(sic) after all. ;)

With this in mind, I can't help but ask the question:

* Semantics, maketing terms, and evangelism efforts aside, are you sure Tim Berners-Lee didn't invent blogging back in 1989?

The more we think things change... the more we realize they haven't. [4]

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[1] : while technically inaccurate, this XPath-influenced link style is something I've had working for a while now and will eventually find its way into both this site as well as other projects. See my comments to a ChannelXML blog entry from Sylvain from a few days ago for more specific details.

[2] : When I say geek, I don't mean hacker/coder/developer/mort, and instead anyone who works in the tech industry and/or LOVES technology to the point of being kinda 'geeky' about it. Lots of geeks work in marketing and other non-technical areas of both the tech and non-tech world.

[3] : My defintion of a weblog is : A place to publish things of personal interest in real-time' Not sure how Websters defines it, but I doubt they differ all that much... will need to check sometime to verify :)

[4] : Needed a new twist, although I doubt much I am the first who twisted 'The more things change, the more they stay the same' into something similar to 'The more we think things change... the more we realize they haven't.'

I'd Google for it, but I already know the answer. They have. ;)