Caltrops - Links 2003





	[quote name="Lufteufel"][quote name="Hokie Mokie, the King of Jazz"][quote name="Lufteufel"]but you do need all kinds of db-driven infrastructure all over the place to have something that resembles a community.[/quote] Nope. Turned out that simply having links as pointers was enough to engender a sense of community. The original weblogs didn't even have comments enabled. You are confusing the features of today's weglogs with the features of the originals, which created community through cross-linking. Weblogs were never a disconnected medium -- they just weren't database driven in their earliest incarnation. [quote name="Lufteufel"]Instant messages, reader comments, web forums, email updates, reviews, ratings, indicies, polls, emoticons, RSS feeds, and all that fancy community-enabling stuff that orbits the blogosphere is what makes the whole experience so attractive now.[/quote] Nope. That's frosting. The thing that makes the experience attractive is lightweight, time-ordered personal publishing and linking. Those other features came about because that core experience was and is good. [quote name="Lufteufel"]You seem to think that all these tools are showing up now because so many people have discovered blogging.[/quote] Nope. I think its a feedback loop. More people == a drive by developers to create more features, and more features == an environment that's more attractive to users. But of course I've quoted you out of order, having saved your best, opening line for last: [quote name="Lufteufel"]You may not need a database to have individual, disconnected weblogs existing in a collaborative vaccuum[/quote] Good of you to acknowledge that weblogs don't require databases, though of course you've completely misunderstood their development by equating simple coding with disconnection. Let's recap, shall we: You find a description of weblogs and personal home pages, and an assertion that though they are of rougly similar technological complexity, weblogs are socially more complex, and thus took more time to develop. You then attack this assertion by enumerating the features of weblogs that make them a far more difficult undertaking than personal home pages, thus demolishing the original contention. Problem is, the features you originally took the trouble to list were not features of weblogs, but were instead taken from another domain entirely, one which you felt more comfortable discussing because you understood how it worked, unlike weblogs. When this is pointed out to you, you indulge yourself in the gayest whining since Lifetime cancelled the Richard Simmons bio-pic, and, during the course of said whining, you actually manage to undermine your original argument by conceding that no, in fact, the original weblogs didn't require database development any more than personal home pages did, which was the whole point of the original quote. That's some nice shootin', Tex. Think you can hit the other foot from this distance? ;hm [/quote] Fine, I'm willing to grant that your boring CGI-script updated homepage technically qualifies as a "weblog." A winner is you, I guess. Almost no one was interested in doing that kind of thing back in 1995, not because we were too dumb to wrap our Neanderthal brains around such a grand, paradigm-busting concept, but because it's <b>totally lame and uninteresting</b>. One might even compare it to an unfrosted cake. And by the way, you say Usenet is dead? Funny, I must have missed the announcement. <a href="http://www.newsadmin.com/top100msgs.htm">I guess all these people did, too.</a> Thank God we can all retreat to safe, well-moderated bastions of intellectual discourse such as <font size="-2" color="gray">snicker</font> Slashdot and <font size="-2" color="gray">guffaw</font> the WELL.[/quote]