About blogs and wikis

March 2004

The current excitement over blogs is curious, since they amount to little more than personal Web pages. Although a standard history of blogging dates the phenomenon to 1997, the key attributes of the blog - a page of selected links and comments in reverse chronological order - can be found as far back as June 1993 on the NCSA What's New site, one of the most popular destinations of the nascent Web world.

In those days, such a constantly-updated page was enormously useful, since it could aspire to provide links to almost all of the new Web sites as they came online. Today, blogs necessarily offer only a partial view of the vastly greater resources now available. This, of course, is their strength: they represent a very personal filter of the otherwise overwhelming data deluge.

One of the best examples of this classic blog is also one of the earliest. Dave Winer, a software industry veteran and co-developer of one of the first blogging software tools, has been producing his blog Scripting News since April 1997. Another of his sites shows new blogs, but the number is now so great that its simple listing is no longer useful. Today there are as many blogs as there were Web pages a few years ago; this has led to the rise of a range of blog search engines.

One of the best is Technorati, which keeps tabs on nearly 2 million blogs. Useful features include NewsTalk, the news items currently being talked about in blogs (a similar service is provided by Blogdex) and a list of the top 100 blogs based on cross- references - a kind of Google for blogs. Such links - formalised as blogrolling - have become one of the defining features of current blogs, to the extent that the entire blogosphere is becoming dangerously self-referential.

In an online world where bloggers' frenzied mutual promotion seems increasingly the norm, the Wiki emerges as an oasis of dignified restraint. It was invented in 1995 by Ward Cunningham, who now works for Microsoft. But the underlying idea of the Wiki - a Web page that anyone can edit or even delete - could hardly be more antithetical to the Redmond way. In a sense, the Wiki is to the blog what open source is to proprietary software: a communal effort where group dynamics rather than a leader's fiat determine the end-result.