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Eric Blair lived an interesting life. It should come as a surprise to no one that this life was noted, recorded and dissected into the daily pages of a journal. Now into the blogosphere come daily notations made by the man who would take the nom de plume George Orwell published 70 years to the day after they were first penned. From the Orwell Diaries:
From 9th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries.
This entry got me all hot and bothered about the daily life and philosophy of Blair. This was the man who believed the destruction of language is an essential part of oppression, laid bear in the creation of Newspeak for 1984. And I had reason to be excited; when the Orwell Project first posted, they teased us with one of Orwell’s most famous quotes from 1984: “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.” Oh man, this is going to be good. Read more »
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We are near the point where very sophisticated content management systems are going to put “enterprise publishing” (e.g. the technology behind NYTimes.com) within reach of nearly everyone, and business bloggers are catching on.
Steve Rubel points to InfoWorld report suggesting that the information management power of blogs could easily replace expensive corporate content management systems. Steve also hypes his client simplehuman, which built its press room using TypePad.
I love the idea, but I’m surprised that so many public relations and marketing bloggers hype TypePad and MoveableType. These certainly are not the tools that spring to mind when I think of a sophisticated content management system.
I’m much more interested in the opensource offerings that are becoming increasingly powerful and userfriendly, like Mambo and Drupal for content management, and WordPress for blogging. The pace of innovation in the open source community is staggering and it makes expensive proprietary systems look clunky by comparison.
Within the next year we should see an easy-to-use, opensource, publishing platform that combines standard CMS features with blogging, wiki, and bulletin board functionality. Right now an experienced network admin could cobble together a system like this by using various applications in tandem. Soon this publishing power will be available to everyone. Will it revolutionize personal publishing like the blog did? Can we handle this much power? It waits to be seen.
To take any available opensource CMS software for a spin, check out opensourceCMS.com.
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The power, the money, and the glory go to those who unify. So, who is going to unify the blogsphere? Technorati seems to be the clear leader of the moment - the Google of the blogsphere - but it has a myriad of competitors. Further, it would seem natural for the big search engines like Google, Yahoo!, or MSN to launch a search function that tracks blogs, but that has yet to happen. Yahoo! is currently testing a blog search.
So, where is the blogsphere headed? I’ve noticed that there are relatively few high quality blogs in any given topic area, and all bloggers list and link to the other good blogs in their particular sphere, so we have developed a very high quality social network that is already completely linked with itself. A search engine like Technorati merely exploits this preexisting network to create a comprehensive compendium of millions of blogs.
Today, bloggers working together can very quickly create a comprehensive network of high quality content. Given this fact, it seems that a network model - yes, sort of like TV and old media - might reemerge, as teams of bloggers get together under the umbrella of a larger organization, which can provide the structure and power needed to win big advertising dollars.
We can see the beginnings of this trend with Gawker and Corante, which offer a select and high quality group of blogs that readers come back to again and again. It is my casual observation that most blog readers only read a very small group of blogs on any kind of a regular basis. If this is true, there is a huge possibility for consolidation in the blogsphere. Yes, eventually most of the power will be concentrated in the hands of a few, just like with old media. That’s the way of the world.
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“The first night out was fitful, scary even. After putting in at Helena, Ark., the homemade raft got caught up in the wash of the massive towboats that surrounded it on the Mississippi. The craft bounced along in the inky black, and then searing beams of light from the towboats began to strafe it, the captains wanting to see what manner of contraption was before them. The ragtag crew slept in terrified shifts, dodging the tugs and avoiding a ledge formed by a dike that threatened to pitch them into the mud, water and mayhem.” nytimes
