About Blogging Fashion

This area is not quite a blog - many people have gone too far with the latest fashion of creating a "personal web log" being nothing else than a "public diary". To some this is natural as for their extrovert personality. But to the society most of the resulting texts carry low information for the reader - in that it contains information about the person and his life. That's just stress, as always with people being to loud and trying to place themselves always in the middle. With the internet technology a lot of people have picked up the fashion and use the personal blogging as a psycho therapy to overcome their miserable life as a troglodyt (cave dweller) having no other friends and social contact than via computer - which they now exaggerate and mark it with pieces from daily `social life`. Reading blogs comes out as variant of daily soaps on TV.

Therefore the latest evolution in blogging is the service of selecting valuable blogs or even beyond that in slicing out interesting pieces from blogs around. These selected entries show valuable information to large group of `readers` from a technical or social viewpoint. It does teach them something beyond being `personal`. People can integrate the information and expand on it. It goes back to the older topic of blogs that came into existance for purely technical reason - in that discussions by mailinglists and usenet have their technical limits.

Reason (a) is about citation reference links. A lot of mailinglists are archived just as usenet groups are archived. But the http URL to those might change somewhen, it all depends on the formatter that translates the unixmail archive (a simple text file) into an html web representation. There are more than one way to order the nodes (with a serial number) being with the sender date, the mailinglist receive date, the thread and subchain of the discussion. What is needed here is now known as a "permalink" with a fixed URL for an entry known not to change. The easiest way: to place a copy of the mailinglist entry onto your homepage with an explicit name. Et voila, a series of such copies will take the form a blog.

Reason (b) is about the internal formatting itself - most users prefer to read mailinglists and usenet newsgroups in plain text representation. That also comes from the fact that many html is swamped with blinking ads or even hidden trojans. The modern mime variant allows to add example files and patches but only in an appendix. And no hyperlink in the original description block. There we see that some mailinglist entries started to post a summary to the group and included an URL to a longer representation on the homepage of a group member. That longer representation could use again all the html tricks and place multiple download tar.gz or example sources. A series of such longer introductoral html pages will take the form of a blog.

Reason (c) is about off-topic discussions plus some off-list discussions. The newsgroups and mailinglists in this world are set to a specific subset of topics given by their name and agenda. However the group members (or part of them) might be also interested in topics only slightly connected. Sometimes discussions spring up where the partakes have similar social bonds in correlation with the other (technical) bond by the newsgroup topic. Usually dubbed off-topic. And some discussions are too detailed like guiding a newbie through the session of a debugger until he finds the real problem connected (or not) to the discussion list topic. For these off-list discussion it is recommended to post summary of the off-list findings but which might need additional overview material. Also for off-topic items you want your own place to get an overview of related material. Putting them on your homepage in a series will take the form of a blog.

Looking close oner finds that the original motivation for blogs are more technical and play the role of a mind map - to organize material and details and spice them up with hyperlinks. This is way different from a personal diary speaking about the person. The (technical) blogs are no more personal than the person being involved in the internet culture and sometimes drawn away from the center of a (technical) discussion list. So in a way it is a personal news service that seeks out interesting topics, edits them and expands on it with reference material, adds a summary and proper subject, and finally places them on the channel.

After all: I kinda hate the reading of `personal diaries` with the usual personal information. I kinda like reading of `news servers` (osnews.com, heise.de/newsticker, teltarif.de/arch) with a competent editor that adds his/her own attribution to the news, atleast classifying them and putting them into context. I did myself wrote articles to be posted on those. And often I have copies of them on my homepage. Putting them into a series makes them a...