Walt Crawford - Starting a Bicycle Club: Weblogs Revisited
Walt Crawford recently had an excellent article in
American Libraries Online:
Starting a Bicycle Club: Weblogs Revisited
http://www.ala.org/al_onlineTemplate.cfm?Section=crawford2004&Template=/ContentM
anagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=52691
I should have noted it earlier. But it's well worth rereading, especially in light of some people being in Dean-ial of the fact that blogs didn't revolutionize politics. Of course, I'm biased, since it quotes me :-)
By Seth Finkelstein | posted in cyberblather | on February 02, 2004 11:59 PM (Infothought permalink) | FollowupsA person attending a weblogging conference compared the "blog bubble"-the tendency to treat weblogs as more important than they are-to the "web bubble." Seth Finkelstein (sethf.com), an experienced freelance filtering/censorware investigator, commented on this issue in his Infothought weblog:
"The problem [with blogs-as-revolution] is that if the optimist says, `This post will reach a million people,' and the pessimist says, `This post will reach 10 people,' and it ends up reaching 100 people, the truth isn't in the middle. The pessimist was basically right, the optimist very wrong.
"It's not bad to reach 100 people. But it's not anywhere near a million people.
The optimist says the equivalent of `Give everyone a bicycle and cars are dead, no more oil, all Middle-East geopolitics will change.' And the pessimist points out, `No, it doesn't work like that; only a very small part of the population wants to ride bikes or will deal with them.' Then the reply is, `But isn't our biking club great fun? I love biking. You love biking. Let's all go ride around on our bikes and enjoy ourselves.'"
Well, yes, you're quoted: Your comment inspired the column. Which, so far, hasn't drawn any denunciations from the bloggers I know...
[Maybe because the people who would give me trouble are gobsmacked about my trying out Bloglines...]
Anyway, thanks for the compliment.
And your name's in front of 64,000+ people, most of them intelligent, thoughtful people with Master's degrees or better... Don't know if it will cause a spike (since it's not a link), but it's recognition.