Blogs: A Four Year Craze (1)

Over the past few years I’ve seen the popularity of web logs grow faster than the mold in my fridge. I really get a kick out of four year crazes. Don’t get me wrong, I think that web logs are profoundly important and here to stay. But right now web logs are experiencing the hype of a four year craze. Hear me out.

My first experience with the World Wide Web was circa 1993. On the weekends my father would take me into work and plop me down in front of a Silicon Graphics workstation while he accomplished work worthy of a weekend visit. I’m proud that my first web experience involved Mosaic, and when it went live a year later, Yahoo. I can’t imagine what it would be like for a child’s first experience with the web to involve Internet Explorer. That must be like learning how to drive on a Pinto. I digress.

Back in the day, when the workstations weren’t in use, they ran this thing called a “screensaver” to keep the monitors from suffering burn-in. Specifically, they ran a screensaver named PointCast. PointCast was a program that featured Push technology. Basically, with Push technology, servers would send data to the client rather than clients requesting it from the server. Hot damn and hallelujah, push technology was going to change the world! I mean, can you imagine it!?!?! Push instead of Pull! Ingenius! Not since Columbus discovered the world is round… blah blah blah.

PointCast pushed stock quotes, news and weather to the computers that subscribed to it. I never really understood PointCast. I mean, if it ran when the computer was idle, then who was there to read the stocks, news and weather? I want my stocks, news and weather when I’m sitting at the computer thank you very much. These silly problems didn’t matter back in the early to mid-nineties because PointCast’s graphics were stunning (for the time) and there weren’t that many choices for a screensaver if you didn’t like flying toasters.

Somehow the enthusiasm for PointCast’s pretty graphics translated into euphoria for Push technology. Of course Push has a place, but after about four years the hype behind Push technology gave way to the common sense benefits of Pull. Push is in use today, but its perceived importance settled down to a realistic level. I guess you could say that gravity pulled Push back to Earth.

Portals

In the late nineties, portals were king. If you didn’t have a portal then why were you even bothering with the web? For those of you not aware, portals are aggregate web sites that pull together content (such as stock, news and weather) all into a convenient, customizable web page. Every search engine turned itself into a portal, with Lycos and Yahoo being the biggest that I can remember. The word Portal became synonymous with the web. Eventually the good people at Google showed that congested portals could be slayed by a clean interface tied to a fast search engine. Of course portals are still around today. For example, some of my current work uses IBM WebSphere Portal. But again, after about four years of hype, their perceived importance has settled down to a realistic level.

Web Logs

Over the last couple of years web logs have become all the rage. In fact, web logs have become so popular that I think they deserve a shorter name. I suggest we start calling them “blogs” for short. Blog. I think it’s kind of catchy, what do you think?

Anyway, blogs have become all the rage. Unlike with push and portals, blogs actually have some power to their punch. In fact, Howard Dean almost lost to George W. Bush instead of to John Kerry thanks to the grassroots effort largely organized through his blog. Trent Lott would probably still be in office today if it weren’t for the power of bloggers and their blogs. Blogs transfer the power of the press from the mighty publisher to the puny peon. Powerful stuff.

But wait a second, didn’t HTML and the World Wide Web give us the power of the press back in 1991? What gives? Why are blogs suddenly getting so much hype?

Yes, blogs have been around since 1991. They just didn’t have a cute name back then. Blogs didn’t get a name until 1999 and didn’t become mainstream popular until 2002ish. Why did it take so long for diary-like web sites to become popular? I submit that the current popularity of blogs is due to the combination of free hosting, free software and the advent of XML and RSS. HTML made web publishing accessible to the technically inclined. Blog hosting and blogging software has made web publishing accessible to those who can use a keyboard and mouse. RSS has allowed bloggers to unite and network their content together. One thousand high-quality, but standalone web sites aren’t nearly as powerful as one hundred medium-quality networked ones. Web sites aren’t effective if nobody reads them. A web site that shares its content in a network (with RSS as the enabling technology) increases its chances of being read and therefore increases its power. The power of a network will always win. Think political parties. Think unions. Think gangs.

What really drives me crazy are the news sites that feel like they’re being left out. So what do they do? They take the normal content they’ve been publishing on the web for years and start calling it a blog. Old wine in a new bottle? How about old Kool-Aid in a new sippy-cup. Putting the timestamp (and not just the date) on a news article is not creating a blog. To their credit, some news sites have allowed their journalists to update blogs in realtime at live events. How can anybody forget Tucker Carlon’s fascinating *sarcasm* blog posts during last year’s vice-presidential debate?

Blogs are powerful. Blogs are fun. Blogs are here to stay. I’m just looking forward to the hype dying down to a realistic level. If my “four year hype hypothesis” is correct, then that should be in twelve to sixteen months. Until then, OH MY GOD BLOGS ARE LIKE SO FREAKING AMAZING!!!!