<rant>who is anyone to tell me what i can or can’t do on the web? i don’t think that ben made a good point at all when he basically said: if you aren’t publishing in my format (as opposed to any other) then you shouldn’t be doing anything in the at all. those were prett much his exact words at the sxsw roundtable discussion and i will tell you that rarely have i ever been so disgusted.
so, maybe his comments were good for some, but what he advocated was no better than what he decried. (oh yeah, this is the kind of self referential stuff that steve was complaining about, also at the same sxsw panel).</rant>
now that i got that out of my system, some more thoughts: it has occurred to me that while some people are longing for these big monolithic projects that used to be all the rage, what they are wishing for really isn’t what the medium of the web is most conducive to. when artists, creative people, started getting on the web, by and large they were coming from a screen medium – cd-rom projects. as time goes on, the web has acquired it’s own voice, which includes big experimental stuff like erik loyer’s marrow monkey, long tracts in word or the fray, but also communally moderated forums like slashdot, and other network-based (the natural mode of the web) models (amazon.com, epinions.com, etc.). weblogs seem to fall in between those two areas, having the important aspects of content (personal voice), and also functioning as a means of collaborative filtering.
now may also be a good time to mention some of my reservations of weblogging as a phenomenom, especially in the sort of celebrity / weird cliquishness it seems to engender. i can’t quite put words on it right now, and i really do think that any sort of self publishing on the web, whether it be the now passé homepage, journals/weblogs (it has a new name now, but people have been doing it since the web was put up)
, but i’m sure that something will come up eventually. anyway, my brain is still fried and i have a crapload of work to do, so off i go.