Lufteufel wrote:

whydirt wrote:

My favorite part:

Hokie Mokie wrote:

I can't tell you why it took as long for weblogs to happen as it did, except to say it had absolutely nothing to do with technology. We had every bit of technology we needed to do weblogs the day Mosaic launched the first forms-capable browser. Every single piece of it was right there. Instead, we got Geocities. Why did we get Geocities and not weblogs? We didn't know what we were doing.

One was a bad idea, the other turns out to be a really good idea. It took a long time to figure out that people talking to one another, instead of simply uploading badly-scanned photos of their cats, would be a useful pattern.

Running a weblog with articles, forums, and user registrations takes a hell of a lot more technology than a few HTML <form> tags.

The free scripting and database technology that drives weblogs (e.g., PHP+MySQL+web interface) wasn't really accessible to non-programmers until recently. Uploading pictures of our cats to static HTML pages was all that most of us could do with widely available technology.

To be honest, I gave up on the article entirely after this clunky gem of flatulent pseudo-profundity:

Geoff Cohen has a great observation about this. He said "The likelihood that any unmoderated group will eventually get into a flame-war about whether or not to have a moderator approaches one as time increases."

You know what? The liklihood that anything will happen anywhere approaches one as time increases, you fatuous fucking gasbag.