mediajunk

The weblog community has been buzzing furiously this weekend at the news of Google's purchase of Blogger. The internet's most trusted brand will bring blogging into the mainstream (where, in any case, the phenomenon was surely headed).

In an insightful analysis, new media journalist Neil McIntosh identifies the positive consequences of the takeover -- real-time searches of blogs; greater recognition for the community -- before tackling the potential downsides:

The main fear among users of software or services other than Blogger (I'm one of those: this site runs on Movable Type, while my personal diary is at Diaryland) is that their sites will not feature as highly in Google's search results. They also worry that thier blogs' contents will not be indexed as regularly as those running on Blogger (which has 1.1 million registered users).

The playing field among bloggers was already unfair, with several A-list" blogs having huge numbers of hits, while the majority fight it out for a much more modest number of visits. Until now, however, such inequality was shown to be a mathematical consequence of the way the web works (ahh, so *that's* why there are little or no comments on this site!).

But Google's entry into the arena could change the "blogosphere". While the world's favourite search engine has won success on the back of its reputation for integrity, there are nevertheless those who disapprove of the closely-guarded code Google uses to "rank" web pages. And, as Lawrence Lessig has long pointed out, on the internet, "code is law".

The single most interesting thing about the blogging phenomenon to date has been the absence of images. Any page looks better with images. Old media learned this a long time ago. Text-only blogs look so ... whiny.

There is much speculation that the arrival of picture-phones will herald a new era of image-laden blogs, or moblogs, as already mentioned in Mediajunk. Picture-phones mainly offer convenience -- your phone is now a camera that can instantly send pictures to an email address.

But the picture quality from cameras is poor at best. For better results, digital cameras are still preferred. Okay, so there's a little more manual work involved, but the end site will justify the means.

So how come blogs don't already have pictures? Well, some of them, at least, do. And, surprise surprise, they look a lot better than their textist counterparts. Photoblog.org has a list of photoblogs from around the world, many of them excellent. (I suspect, by the way, that the name 'photoblog' will go the way of other ejargon and eventually we will simply come to expect a blog to have pictures.)

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Slightly related to this is the interesting and smoothly-designed Mirror Project which, as the name suggests, contains pictures that people have taken of themselves in reflective surfaces. Yes, it's pointless. But you're dying to see it now, aren't you?

*Sigh* -- okay, here you go...

A combative article by frustrated interface designer David Heller has been making a splash of late. Heller argues that HTML is an impedement to the web's progress; it is time we abandoned this kludgy markup language and "moved on".

Really? Haven't we heard all this before? Heller, like others before him, is right to bemoan the "lowest common denominator" approach that consicentious designers are resigned to choosing, because of the inconsistencies between browsers and platforms.

But he fails to acknowledge the reasons why HTML, against all predictions, is still with us after 10 years (and remember: web years = dog years x 7):

a) HTML is irreversibly enmeshed into the fabric of the web. Like touch-typing on a QWERTY keyboard, making pages with hypertext markup language is a skill that few, of the millions who have achieved it, would be willing to relinquish. HTML has thus gained a memetic advantage in the evolution of the early internet.

b) HTML is easy-to-do. You don't need special software (I make most of my pages in Notepad). Heller, one quickly realizes, is from a programming background. Most people who create web pages aren't. Unfortunately, many software engineers mistakenly believe that the internet is *theirs*; the rest of us ordinary users are blundering cyber-serfs.

c) HTML works. Sure, it's clunky and a page designed for IE 5.0 on Windows 98 looks different on Netscape 7.0 on an iMac. But you can still see it. It doesn't crash. It's dependable. You get the information. You get the pictures. That covers most of what the average web user wants.

HTML is dead. Long live HTML.

While some firms may be taking action to stop their employees blogging during work hours, others are embracing blogs as a means of promotion and knowledge sharing.

Internet leading light Jupiter Research has launched the weblogs of several of its top analysists. Since each of the analysts has a special area of reserach (wireless technologies; media and entertainment; etc.), the blogs are thematically differentiated. The company sees value in embracing the internet's spirit of openness. "[Blogging] allows us the opportunity to engage our clients in new ways and to share our insight with the world," Jupiter Research Director Michael Gartenberg told Yahoo News.

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In another exmaple of sanctioned blogging, staff at the Oregon Daily Emerald -- the daily student newspaper of the University of Oregon -- are keeping personal diaries on the newspaper's site. 11 staff members launched blogs on January 12. While many professional journalists have their own blogs/sites, one wonders whether any mainstream news publications will adopt a similar policy of "in-house" weblogging?