The Wandering Geek

Blogs are interesting things. I’m not sure blogging itself was a very new or even ingenious idea; I think advances in search, coupled with ideas like tagging and the accessibility of a pure browser-based content medium made the idea of blogging more appealing (You mean someone might actually read what I write?). I had a PHP-Nuke-based pseudo-blog back in 2000-2001; I used it as a way to distribute software and howtos. There were certainly many online journals prior to that, they just weren’t called blogs.

From a purely utilitarian standpoint, Usenet is a much nicer medium for conversations (Blogger’s posting model is particularly bad). However, if you want to get noticed and perhaps make some money from what you write, blogs are it. Blogging has also changed the political landscape forever. I came across this decent comparison of blogs and Usenet recently (noted with some irony that I’m linking to a blog and not a Usenet post).