Yuccablog

Thursday, August 17, 2006

Publishing made too easy?

To be honest, I created this blog partly because I am writing a book on making use of the Internet, and there I discuss the simple methods of publishing on the Web. Creating and starting a blog was surprisingly simple and fast, though with some some pitfalls—I have never liked the idea of having to check a checkbox, and captchas are particularly evil.

More or less, everyone who knows how to write, in the very technical sense of the words, as a matter of basic literacy, can have a blog.

However, the question arises whether publishing has been made too easy. When everyone can publish texts about everything, he will. It becomes more and more difficult to find anything interesting on the Web. Who would like to read everyone’s texts? Most people mostly have nothing to say that might be of interest to any wide audience, or they lack the basic skills of saying it.

Then again, I might be an elitist. Actually, I am. Most people can speak, and most people can learn to write, too. There is an ongoing change that is making written communication far more important than it used to be. Almost everyone sends text messages and E-mail, and blogs just add an interesting ingredient. The publication threshold is vanishing, and we will just need to develop better filters for what we even consider reading.

Oh well, I was blogged

I had firmly decided to never create a blog, but here I am. I was minding my own business when I stumbled across a blog, via a link, and felt a compulsion to comment on a blog entry. Suddenly I found myself registering in a system that (hopefully) gives me the right to post a comment there but also creates a blog for me.