Andrew Orlowski looks to be trying to stir up protest from bloggers-about-blogging again. Orlowski, of course, is doing well from trawling "blogspace" and rewriting other people's objections.
The main point is sound: I can't imagine why anyone would shell out $500 to spend a weekend talking about blogging.
The comparison of weblog tools with DTP tools isn't really a good one. The quantitative difference in ease of publication using DTP software, a printer, and stamps, to that of publishing using weblog software, is so large as to become a qualitative difference. And DTP software demanded that its user be competent in design to produce the smallest newsletter: blocks of text must be fitted together round the page, and so on. The result of this is that the uninitiated made use of the 300 fonts they had available, and produced abominations. With weblogs, the format leads towards uniformity, not away from it: each story is styled the same way, and posts are displayed in a single column.
Well, unlike the HTML coders who populate the blogging-about-blogging part of blogdom, these excellent, content-first webloggers spend little time congratulating themselves on their choice of medium. None of them use sticky weblog distractions (sorry, 'innovations!') such as Trackbacks, which cause so much grief for Google users. In fact, they spend most of their time writing well, rather than congratulating themselves for being "bloggers".
All well and good. If you aren't interested in blogging software, don't read the blogs written by the people making it. The beauty of this stuff is that you can ignore it if you're not interested. As for trackbacks, I think pretty much everyone would acknowledge that they are far from perfect. But to blame the people who use them for skewing Google's results is downright absurd. The algorithm doesn't work, so the raw material must be broken.
I bet you there are magazines about newspaper printing, and I bet you they talk about ink:
The medium is not the message. Imagine how tedious newspapers would be if every other story proclaimed "We use INK!!!" The writers don't care, and the readers don't care, how this message was delivered: but readers do care about quality.
The "it's only a tool, it's what you do with it that matters" is all well and good, but it fails to notice that tools have an enormous impact on their users. So tools are important. And talking about tools is important. And it will always remain so.
I remain unsure what BloggerCon was supposed to be about, and for. It isn't a gathering of techies, the guys developing the software which enables blogging. So you might see it as an attempt by the techies to get the users talking about how they use the tools. That has the potential to be useful, but the problem is that the users are unlikely to want to pay for the privilege. And because most weblog software is free -- either as in speech or as in beer -- the techies can't pay either.
Give up, I say. Blogspace plus the odd wiki seem an effective way of collaborating.
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