Blogs are homepages... with all the personal opinion, bias, and emotion thatcan come from hosting your own web page. I like the analogy to email and IM as a phenomenon; blogs will allow us to connect with many more thoughts worldwide than was possible before – the railroad, the telegraph, the telephone-- email, IM, and now blogs; they all have made the world a smaller planet. However, all of these technologies have also increased the amount of noise both within and without the network; as our means of communication and technology for the exchange of ideas become more and more pervasive, we will also need to devise new mechanisms for handling the rising volume of global shout.

As you say, blogs are loud animals, but I think they will quiet down. There is only so much information that we as readers can process, only so many links we can follow in a day. We will see clusters of blog communities emerge; instead of a network where many to many are connected, blogging on a large scale will gravitate towards a model where a select number will attract a significant following. We already see it today, with “popular” sites like instapundit.com or zeldman.com - blogs are, after all, the printing press of the Internet, a printing press without cost. It will therefore not be surprising to see classics and weekly best-sellers emerge, while there will always be the independent bookstore for those who like to remain off the beaten path.

Posted by Booker Reader at 10:44 PM, Wednesday, June 2, 2004