I had the opportunity of being on a phone hookup this morning with Andy Wibbells from Easy Bake Weblogs (the recording will be avilable soon), on the topic of blogs and there’s one point I made thats resonated with me since: blogging is the ultimate in level playing fields.
What other forum can deliver your thoughts to millions of readers without the need for any technical expertise? If you can get on the internet, through home, work, cafe or other way, you can write a blog. They said back in the 90’s that services like Geocities did this, but I disagree, the early home page phenomenon provided the potential of an internet presence for all, but it wasn’t a level playing field: you needed to have some idea about presentation and they weren’t as usable as blogs. Compare and contrast this to blogging; you set up an account, you write a title for a post, you write your content, and then you hit publish.
Every minute of every day thousands of new blogs are being created and posted to around the world. It doesn’t matter whether you are rich or poor, black or white, gay, straight or other, or where you live (as long as you can get on the net) : any one can blog, and more are more people are. This is the goldrush folks; and instead of having to travel far and wide to get to the gold, the gold is delivered to your door step. Whether you choose to dig for gold is strictly up to yourselves.
And the great unspoken thing about blogging, Duncan, is that it’s proactive. That may seem obvious, but everything else we do on a hooked up screen : TV, standard internet etc is basically passive. We’re fed what the other guy wants us to receive. Only blogging makes us use our own minds and experience and forces us to create something personal out of our own heads. I reckon that will have an enormous effect on the kids of the future. They will be smarter, better organized and able to express themselves like no other generation before them.