Beautiful morning here in the woods. I’m off to Vermont to our
friends the Dean campaign..so the drive should be beautiful up through
the woods and low mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont..
Had a brilliant dinner with Dave Winer last nite at the Green Papaya in
Waltham–nice Thai cafe just off 128. Dave was on
about the future of blogging. His post this morning
on the shape of weblog software summarizes part of his vision–blogs
everywhere, in the enterprise, in the home, in the campaign, with lots
of nets and links among and between..But the part I like is how we will
be able to reshape society and the major institutions of society, and
social relationships in the broad. I can’t summarize it well
because I need to get on the road, but here are some clues from the
conversation.
With one click we will be able to more or less “know” a person or a
group who is blogging. Think about what this means for the next
president–who may not have to rely on polling when he can click
through and learn much about the views of a variety of citizens,
directly. And when he can study meta trends based on what people
write to each other, and comment on, and discuss–rather than based on
answers to poll questions.
News will be something that we can assemble from communities of
thousands of correspondents. Think of Google news but instead of
based on the Toronto Globe and Mail et al, based on thousands and
thousands of networks of self-validating communities of observers and
thinkers…
And “we” in the preceeding sentence can be you, or me–it need not be
Walter Cronkite. As Dave said last night,
“Walter Cronkite used to
end his show with ‘and that’s the way it is…’
Today, we don’t want someone telling us “that’s the way it is” whether
in news or government or business. We want to decide “what way it
is”–and of course we hope to help shape how the future is
created.”
Blogging is the broad term for technology that is
responding to this desire.
