(2002-05-10) e

WebLog article Of The Day by Steven Johnson. But the journalistic form itself won't be all that earth-shattering. I disagree with this more and more. The recent Pim Fortuyn situation has brought focus to the uncorrected sloppiness of traditional media - I think the real issue is about thinking that any one source can tell you anything trustworthy about anything. I think people will get more and more of their "news" online simply because of the possibility of a broader and more accurate view.

• Scott Rosenberg gets closer. The rise of blogs does not equal the death of professional journalism. The media world is not a Zero-Sum Game. Increasingly, in fact, the Internet is turning it into a symbiotic EcoSystem - in which the different parts feed off one another and the whole thing grows.

But some of his BlogWeb ideas aren't bad. I don't always want to know what uber-blogger Jason Kottke happens to be thinking about this morning - I want to know what he thinks about the page I'm currently reading, or the paragraph I just wrote. I agree: BlogDex and DayPop have to hold non-current data. Perhaps this can be made more scalable (if that's an issue) by only saving the old links information (RDF?), and not the words themselves! I also agree that being to filter such views based on a list of "favorites" is key.

• But suggesting standardized tags for just five or six additional elements (Semantic Web alert) is crazy. And I bet some decent text processing would achieve most of the value. This will eventually happen through the next generation of tools, whether desktop-based (e.g. Radio Userland, Reptile) or server-based (BlogDex).

re: "eventually happen through the next generation of tools": I've been waiting for this about ten years, and i'm still browsing the options (as they continue to evolve). I'd like File Maker and Radio Userland much more if they were GPL; Wiki Wiki imho is critical. I'm still agnostic on "weblogs". --JohnAbbe