I’ve rediscovered one of the original reasons people started blogging. It provides a history of the sites you’ve found interesting while browsing the web.
Last night I wanted to take another look at a site I’d seen a few days before, but I couldn’t remember where I’d seen it. I began to trace my steps through other people’s blogs. I knew I had seen it after I had read Doc Searls in my blogroll, so I started at Evhead, which is where I had in fact seen it, but he shows so few post that it had already fallen off the end of the page. It turns out that onfocus mentioned the site too, so I found it there, and then I found Evhead’s original post in his archives.
The site was massless.org, whose design is simple yet effective, a characteristic I aim to emulate. If I’d only posted her link in my blog, I wouldn’t have had to spend all that time trying to find it again.
Well now you know what to do and where it was :D
That’s actually the original definition of a weblog. Journals are supposed to be something separate, but nobody pays attention to the distinction anymore.
That’s more or less what I was referring to, which is why I linked to Jorn’s definition. I think in most people’s minds the definition has evolved, so a weblog is rarely a list of the sites someone browsed that day. It has come to include news and memes, along with a dash of personal activities thrown in. In fact, I can’t think of a blog that only has a list of links that the person visited that day. There’s much more commentary, discussion of things that happened that day and opinions about current events.
I’m new to the “blog” community myself, and I’m guilty of using it as a journal. But who cares, really. The internet itself did not start out, nor was it intended to be, the massive resource of public information that it is today. Hell, I was on “the internet” in 1987 when I was in college, and all it was (as far as I could tell) was a very limited text communication service between universities and government agencies. Now it’s evolved into a huge conglomeration of anything you could possibly think of. I think it’s an improvement, on the whole, on the original idea. So too, with weblogs.