Blogs: the Next Generation Internet

There’s plenty of discussion these days as to whether blogs are worthwhile, will they kill e-mail, will they overtake/obsolete professional journalism, and after all, who wants to read all that personal junk anyway?

While there are good arguments for all sides on each point, all of those discussions entirely miss something very important: the content delivery system popularly known as the blog represents the future of the Internet. They’re the next generation of websites, if you will.

If you can forget what you may have heard about the content of blogs and/or their purposes, and think of blogs more as active websites, with the traditional kind of website being passive or static, then you’re halfway there. Hang with me here for a bit, and I’ll explain why.

How I Became a Blogger
In the past, going way back to the 1970s and Tim Berners-Lee’s early experiments with the Internet, and coming into the late 1990s, you had to be a tech-oriented person to have a website. Even software such as Front Page, Dreamweaver, or Homestead, which are thought of as incredibly easy by most tech people, are still not easy enough for the average individual. There’s too much complexity there; too many steps to go through to end up with a finished website.

For somebody like me, even, who has hovered around the fringes of computer technology since the late 1960s, without really needing a website until the century turned, building a website was a tedious, time-consuming exercise. Updating it, which at one point I needed to do every two weeks, was always left to the absolute last minute. Though I still maintain several static websites, updating those are low on my list of priorities.

Last year at this time, I was considering abandoning the Internet altogether. In fact, the materials I’d written for my promo workshop for writers de-emphasized online activities in favor of in-person, locally-oriented things a writer could do to promote their works. The online discussion groups and forums were having less and less activity, static websites needed constant promotion, and e-mailed newsletters were getting lost in a morass of spam filters and nanny software. Things had gotten to the point where you had to first promote anything designed to promote your books, and the options for doing that were fewer all the time.

It was not a friendly landscape for writers working with small advertising budgets. A nice 9-to-5 with a little newspaper or magazine somewhere was beginning to seem like the best way for me to go. The Internet wasn’t fun or attractive anymore, either for me or apparently for many of my colleagues.

Sometime in the late spring I caught wind of blogs as a new possibility. I’d heard of them before, but wasn’t fully aware of the RSS feed which makes a blog live. That’s one huge difference right there. When you build a static website, you then have to go out and get people to visit it. (Often one at a time, these days.) With a blog, the RSS feed enables the website to do some of that for you. For me, this was a clear opportunity that could not be passed up.

I thought back to the time when my first PC was new. I remembered one day sitting at the old 8088 and knowing the possibilities for this thing were enormous, if there was only some way ordinary people like me could crack the code...

Simplicity at Last!I wasn’t disappointed when I took my first shot at building a blog last year. While there were still some details I didn’t quite get, and instructions often presumed the reader knew some basic particulars I didn’t know, all of the blog hosts are working on those things. They are getting even easier as time goes by. You can leave the basic mechanics of the vehicle to the tech guys and concentrate on your content.

One thing that is very attractive about this is that you don’t have to download anything. You go right to the host and set it all up. Since it is all based online, you can work on your site from any location that has Internet access. You don’t even need your own computer.

There’s no dealing with extra details such as needing to know if the software you have is compatible with the software the host has, or paying several different fees for different things for the same website, and trying to remember all of that. Each blog will also have its own domain name, unless you want something else, in which case most hosts will direct you on how to do that.

There are still ways to have a blog for free, as well, and with a minimum of intrusive advertising.

The templates available have enough options to avoid looking too much like anybody else’s website. On this kind of website, the content is the important thing anyway, so the visual design is almost a non-issue. Once you’ve got your site set up, it takes only minutes to add new content as often as you like.

So finally, a website is within the reach of just about anybody. That’s the exciting thing, the availability. With that availability, you can use it for any purpose, to publish any content you care to post online, at any frequency you like. Depending on your purposes, your audience can be large or small, and your visitors can add their own comments or not as you choose. You can be nearly anonymous and post under a pseudonym, or use your own identity and be fully approachable by the world. It’s all up to you!

Internet 2.0
There are yes, enormous possibilities now, not to mention some unanticipated benefits.

A few of the things I’ve noticed: Those teenagers and pre-teens trying out their swear words and vying to win the title of “most bored,” are practicing their writing and reading skills; learning to communicate almost in spite of themselves. Retirees who are out seeing the world from their RVs can stop and quickly post details of their trip, (complete with photos) so their relatives and friends can keep apprised of their progress. With more people reading and publishing blogs every day, this means more people will begin to get used to reading all kinds of material online, which will eventually be a help to the e-book industry.

Of course writers have plenty of ways they can use a blog. This is limited only by their own imaginations. The fact that so many blogs right now are personal diaries is, to me at least, just an accident of the way things happened in the early stages of the technology. Nobody’s got any rules for what the content of this kind of active website must be, or how often you need to update.

I have five blogs, with more on the way, because I have a variety of interests, and I’m always getting new ideas. Each of the three hosts I use right now has its own personality as well, with different ways of working and different things you can do there. For me, blogging was a way of breaking out from the “preaching to the choir” aspect that was increasingly frustrating my online efforts to promote my books. I still don’t have a daily journal online, and probably won’t.

I started by converting my e-mailed activist newsletter to a blog, then offered space on another blog to some minister friends, and set up a third blog (this one) about books, writing, and promotion. Number Four was the full text of one of my early novels, posted a bit at a time, and the most recent is about cooking and grocery shopping. Now that I’ve got kind of a rhythm established, it takes about an hour or so every day to update them all, and I’m not too concerned about taking a day or so off here and there.

When I was offline entirely for three weeks in January, I was surprised to find it affected my readership much less than I’d expected. All of them have a good percentage of material that is not time-sensitive or topical, so anyone happening by will always have something to read, and links to explore further.

The best news has been that the number of visits to all my various sites far exceed anything I’d accomplished with any site before, individually or together.

Now, I’m sure none of this would have happened had I not taken full advantage of the RSS feed, and the fact I’d spent most of the previous months frequently posting, and letting people know my various blogs are there. Next time, I’ll go into more on RSS, how it works, and how to go about establishing a readership in this emerging new sphere!

Comments

[Daisy]

I enjoyed your blogging literacy autobiography--it's nice to hear someone's story about how they ame to the technology. I think your readers become more invested that way.
Also, your active/passive discussion echoes the essay "Homepages, Blogs and the Chronotopic Dimensions of Personal Civic (Dis-)Engagement" I recently read in _Rhetorical Democracy_.

[Mark Boudreau]

You hit the nail right on the head. Not only are blogs easier to do then static websites, they are more addictive. Since I started The Rock and Roll Report (www.rockandrollreport.com) I have been having so much fun focusing on the creative aspect of writing that when a techical issue comes up I am not as afraid to deal with it as I know for the most part it will not affect my blog in a way that say, screwing up an FTP upload to a server would. On top of that, there are so many things that the blog format will encompass in the future like audioblogging and video blogging that anybody, anywhere can truly unleash their creative side and really broadcast to the world. Also, and this is perhaps the most important part for a majority of the bloggers out there, it's a lot of fun.
Mark

[RP WebDeveloper]

I'm responsible for our Intranet at a large school district in Phoenix and I enjoyed reading about your computer > Internet > website > blogging experiences! I'm marking your page as a favorite because I also look forward to more about your blogs.

Would you please explain what you mean by RSS feed? I still don't understand the difference between a blog and using an ISP's application to easily create a website. What makes a blog dynamic?

I'm quite familiar with various applications, ISP applications online as well as purchased programs like Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive, BBEdit, that easily allow someone to create a website without knowing any html. But in my experience, it takes scripting or a database to create a website that is what I think of as "dynamic" - web pages that are actually created at the moment for each user based on where they clicked just before . . .

[Wayne Hurlbert]

That's a great story. You express very well the power and immediacy of blogging. You are correct. A blog with an RSS feed is truly alive. It pushes the information out, while the blog also pulls the readers in. Some people have said a blog can't be both a push and a pull medium. I disagree. I look forward to more of your blogs.