The Times: Tech column - Top blogs/DVD format wars/Belgian enterprise
By David Rowan
HERE'S a trade secret that could get this column suspended from journalism's equivalent of the Magic Circle: there is a way to be stupendously well informed without reading absolutely everything. Just leave the filtering to other find minds, and scour the highlights in their weblogs - online journals that link to the best finds of an opinionated editor or community.
As commercial content sites continue to disappear from the Web, the number of weblogs, or "blogs", is growing exponentially. Three years ago, there were 23 known weblogs - so named because they log their writers' journeys through the Web. Today, according to MIT's Media Laboratory, there are 13,119 blogs influential enough to merit indexing, with thousands more offering individuals' observations to their niche audiences.
If you hunger for technology news, your one-stop shop might be Slashdot.org or Kuro5hin.org. There are blogs that monitor the absurd consumer detritus being auctioned at eBay (Who WouldBuyThat.com) or the daily movements of the band U2 (U2log.com). This cottage publishing industry even has its own annual awards, the Bloggies, to be announced on January 30. Thanks to free, easy-to-use software such as Pyra Labs' Blogger, anyone can become a publisher: you simply choose a template, type your entries and click a button to upload them to your own Web space. Blogger has more than 300,000 registered users, and some have reported 15,000 hits a day since the September 11 attacks.
Last week, Blogger was so overloaded that it had to stop users updating their sites. It now plans to launch a paid-for service - and founder Evan Williams will be sharing his thoughts on his own weblog, evhead.com.
The weblog phenomenon is proof that professional journalists can no longer claim a monopoly on deciding what's news. In the words of Rebecca Blood, author of the Rebecca's Pocket weblog, rebeccablood.net: "By highlighting articles that may easily be passed over by the typical Web user too busy to do more than scan corporate news sites, by searching out articles from lesser-known sources, and by providing additional facts, alternative views, and thoughtful commentary, weblog editors participate in the dissemination and interpretation of the news that is fed to us every day."
Here are six blogs worth bookmarking:
Blogdex (blogdex.media.mit.edu): This ingenious project of the MIT Media Lab is a blog of blogs: by indexing the pages most linked to by thousands of weblogs each day, it reveals which stories are making the Web buzz.
MetaFilter (www.metafilter.com): A lively "community blog" whose 13,214 members (anyone can join) post links and comments, to which other members append their own thoughts.
Slashdot (slashdot.org): An established "news for nerds" community that focuses on technology.
Plastic (www.plastic.com): A Slashdot for a range of subjects, using professional and ordinary members.
Memepool (memepool.com): An intense community of links archived by subject from art to zoology. It takes a while to follow a sentence comprising nine hyperlinks.
InstaPundit (instapundit.com): Glenn Reynolds, a Tennessee law professor, offers a consistently lively guide to US and international commentary. "If you've got a modem, I've got an opinion," he states.
++++
REMEMBER Betamax v VHS? You'd think the consumer electronics industry would have learnt to work together by now, but no, we're in for another expensive fight over absurdly incompatible technologies.
The Digital Video Recorder (DVD) might be today's hot gadget, but hold your breath if you are planning to buy a recordable version as the prices come down. You see, nobody can agree on the format - and Panasonic's DVD-RAM system will be ranged against Pioneer's DVD-RW and Philips's DVD+RW, not all of which are compatible with today's hardware.
There's even a Recordable DVD Council that won't agree a common system with the rival DVD+RW Alliance, so don't expect to borrow a friend's movie. Our advice to consumers confused by the rival offerings: don't buy anything, until the industry has battled this one out.
++++
NEWSGROUPS were buzzing this weekend after the Belgian Deputy Prime Minister, Laurette Onkelinx, was reported to be planning to put a computer in every home at the Government's expense. She had even, apparently, started negotiating for the kit with Compaq and Microsoft. Alas, such forward thinking neglected to consider the views of a small but evangelical religion known as "Linux users". They are now bombarding her with e-mails demanding that their free-source operating system, rather than Mr Gates's, is the beneficiary of such an ambitious social experiment. If Robin Cook ever gets anywhere with his online voting plans, he ought to remember to put an extra box below Labour, Tory and LibDem: "Don't care, just as long as Linux is counting my vote."
(The Times, January 14 2002)
HERE'S a trade secret that could get this column suspended from journalism's equivalent of the Magic Circle: there is a way to be stupendously well informed without reading absolutely everything. Just leave the filtering to other find minds, and scour the highlights in their weblogs - online journals that link to the best finds of an opinionated editor or community.
As commercial content sites continue to disappear from the Web, the number of weblogs, or "blogs", is growing exponentially. Three years ago, there were 23 known weblogs - so named because they log their writers' journeys through the Web. Today, according to MIT's Media Laboratory, there are 13,119 blogs influential enough to merit indexing, with thousands more offering individuals' observations to their niche audiences.
If you hunger for technology news, your one-stop shop might be Slashdot.org or Kuro5hin.org. There are blogs that monitor the absurd consumer detritus being auctioned at eBay (Who WouldBuyThat.com) or the daily movements of the band U2 (U2log.com). This cottage publishing industry even has its own annual awards, the Bloggies, to be announced on January 30. Thanks to free, easy-to-use software such as Pyra Labs' Blogger, anyone can become a publisher: you simply choose a template, type your entries and click a button to upload them to your own Web space. Blogger has more than 300,000 registered users, and some have reported 15,000 hits a day since the September 11 attacks.
Last week, Blogger was so overloaded that it had to stop users updating their sites. It now plans to launch a paid-for service - and founder Evan Williams will be sharing his thoughts on his own weblog, evhead.com.
The weblog phenomenon is proof that professional journalists can no longer claim a monopoly on deciding what's news. In the words of Rebecca Blood, author of the Rebecca's Pocket weblog, rebeccablood.net: "By highlighting articles that may easily be passed over by the typical Web user too busy to do more than scan corporate news sites, by searching out articles from lesser-known sources, and by providing additional facts, alternative views, and thoughtful commentary, weblog editors participate in the dissemination and interpretation of the news that is fed to us every day."
Here are six blogs worth bookmarking:
Blogdex (blogdex.media.mit.edu): This ingenious project of the MIT Media Lab is a blog of blogs: by indexing the pages most linked to by thousands of weblogs each day, it reveals which stories are making the Web buzz.
MetaFilter (www.metafilter.com): A lively "community blog" whose 13,214 members (anyone can join) post links and comments, to which other members append their own thoughts.
Slashdot (slashdot.org): An established "news for nerds" community that focuses on technology.
Plastic (www.plastic.com): A Slashdot for a range of subjects, using professional and ordinary members.
Memepool (memepool.com): An intense community of links archived by subject from art to zoology. It takes a while to follow a sentence comprising nine hyperlinks.
InstaPundit (instapundit.com): Glenn Reynolds, a Tennessee law professor, offers a consistently lively guide to US and international commentary. "If you've got a modem, I've got an opinion," he states.
++++
REMEMBER Betamax v VHS? You'd think the consumer electronics industry would have learnt to work together by now, but no, we're in for another expensive fight over absurdly incompatible technologies.
The Digital Video Recorder (DVD) might be today's hot gadget, but hold your breath if you are planning to buy a recordable version as the prices come down. You see, nobody can agree on the format - and Panasonic's DVD-RAM system will be ranged against Pioneer's DVD-RW and Philips's DVD+RW, not all of which are compatible with today's hardware.
There's even a Recordable DVD Council that won't agree a common system with the rival DVD+RW Alliance, so don't expect to borrow a friend's movie. Our advice to consumers confused by the rival offerings: don't buy anything, until the industry has battled this one out.
++++
NEWSGROUPS were buzzing this weekend after the Belgian Deputy Prime Minister, Laurette Onkelinx, was reported to be planning to put a computer in every home at the Government's expense. She had even, apparently, started negotiating for the kit with Compaq and Microsoft. Alas, such forward thinking neglected to consider the views of a small but evangelical religion known as "Linux users". They are now bombarding her with e-mails demanding that their free-source operating system, rather than Mr Gates's, is the beneficiary of such an ambitious social experiment. If Robin Cook ever gets anywhere with his online voting plans, he ought to remember to put an extra box below Labour, Tory and LibDem: "Don't care, just as long as Linux is counting my vote."
(The Times, January 14 2002)
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