Seb keeps a blog with pointers and thoughts on the evolution of knowledge sharing and scholarly communication
. Here’s a recent followup to a Richard MacManus piece asking: why would normal people want to publish to the Web?
While I agree wholeheartily with the sentiments expressed by John and others
like Phil Wolff, I wonder how
practical it is to expect business people to write k-logs. It’s all very well having
tools like k-collector to aggregate Intranet
content, but the real issue is how do we get people to create the
content in the first place? Interestingly, this is the exact same problem
the Semantic Web has getting off the ground, people currently aren’t writing
enough metadata to make the Semantic Web happen.
Accurate observations in there. I honestly believe blogging as we
currently know it will never become mainstream. The reason is that it
is a poor fit for anyone who isn’t the (hyper)text-driven, infovore kind of
person.However, that doesn’t mean that the more general practice of broadcasting information of personal relevance will not become mainstream. My vision of the future in this respect is closest to what Marc Canter.s been pushing under the moniker of .digital lifestyle aggregator.; this also seems to be where Meg Hourihan is heading with the Lafayette project.
Think about restaurant/show reviews, recipes, pictures. The Web is
already full of user-contributed stuff like that; most of it currently
resides on centralized sites like
Amazon. The individuals who help build those sites do so most of the
time with no reward other than a high local profile that is generally non-transferable
(how many Amazon reviewers are on your blogroll?). I.m willing to bet
that many of them would prefer keeping control over their contributions
and putting themselves at the center of their content if systems were available that made that easy.