(2003-04-07) Greenspun On Blog

Philip Greenspun on the WebLog medium. In terms of the distribution of authorship the Weblog seems to have ushered in a Third Age... As for Dave Winer... Well, he is obviously an innovative thinker. It takes about 3 days to write a Discussion Forum in a decent RDBMS/Web programming environment. Probably 2 more days to add the core blog features. Thus a tiny percentage of the programming effort expended every day at organizations ranging from Microsoft to Oracle to a Fortune 500 corp to a newspaper site to a university. And yet nobody did it until Dave!... As for Dave the Man he's a nice guy personally but like a lot of folks who've made big contributions he is very focussed on a few themes. The themes that I've seen him focussed on are OutLining, Object Data Base-s, and his Radio Userland blogging software. Kind of refreshing in a world that watches CNN obsessively...