Sunday, September 22, 2002
Weblogs Have Been Around Forever... So Why Now?
As I've been putting my thoughts together to begin teaching a workshop regarding weblogs over the next two weeks, and again later in the semester, I was really struck by Dave Winer's
history of weblogs, in which he proposes that the very first webpage was a weblog. He continues to present that NCSA's "
What's New?" page and later, Netscape Communication's "
What's New?" page were simply weblogs. If one can say that weblogs have been around as long as the web itself, why has it taken so long for them to become recognized as a separate form of web publishing?
Today, weblogging, is often affiliated with types of software. Nearly any weblogging story you read in the media lists the current offering of weblogging software and their pros and cons. Weblogging however, is not about software at all. So what is it about this software that has been able to encourage what has been possible all along? I think that it has to do with the real nature of weblogs, the focus on content. Web pages typically require a lot of thought regarding the form of the page before one can begin to move content into them. There are also considerations such as site architecture and depth that always need to be addressed. This is much more than most people want to deal with. It's more than I, a web developer, want to deal with. People have often asked me if I have a web page and I have always responded that I simply don't have time or cause to have my own. Websites are a lot of work. Weblogs (getting back to the topic) however get all of the form issues out of the way at the very beginning, wether you design it yourself or choose a provided "theme", and allow you to spend the rest of your time posting true content to your webpage.
While a person could have been doing this for the last ten (almost) years with BBEdit or Dreamweaver, those tools really discouraged content development. The young web has been maturing rapidly and with it the complexity of web sites. Today, there are few commercial websites that are built with the static pages that so many of us have learned how to build. Web servers talk with database servers and create dynamic pages containing custom data for each visitor. At one time, students in high school learning HTML were acquring professional-level skills. Today, students learning those same skills are simply getting a taste of the industry, just as I got a taste of woodworking when I built a giant wooden paperclip in eighth grade shop. Today's web is about databases, and along with them, content management systems.
Content management systems are systems put in place to allow easy posting and editing of data on a website. There are been very expensive solutions in the corporate world for a number of years. These typically start at around $30,000 and offer a lot of great features including the establishment of editorial processes for posted stories and simplified layout control. One thing that is so nice about these systems is that the designers are left to designing, the database managers are left to managing, and most importantly, the content contributors need to worry about nothing but their content. It is a very freeing experience when you realize that you can type something and hit "post" and know that it's online.
Today's weblogging tools offer content management systems for very small sites, inexpensively. Some sites such as Blogger and LiveJournal offer free ad-based weblogs. Userland sells it's Manila software (which runs on a server) and Radio (which runs on your computer) very reasonably. All of these products, along with others, allow you to simply pick a design and start posting content.
There's a lot of talk in the Edu-blogging community of using Blogs with journalism and writing students. Web design purists may ask if these products are really teaching the skills that one will need when they enter the field. I feel that there are few things better today, in regards to web publishing, than to get them used to interacting with a content management system. Art student may want to get dirty with a layout program and cascading style sheets, and computer science students may need to begin working with SQL and middleware options, but to those that will be providing the content on today and tomorrow's web, content management, wether through a personal weblog or to a more corporate site is as real as it can get.
All of this said, I feel that there is a great future for weblogs and what they teach about the nature of today's web publishing world in education. From a technology standpoint, they give the author a web authoring experience that is much closer to what they may actually encounter in thier future than if they had been made to build their own page with a web design product. Secondly, it marries traditional writing activities with current technology in a way that I feel would encourage students to use it.
5:38:07 PM 
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