Naive and excited
‘ve been reading about blogging–and reading blogs–for almost a year. Probably the first one that caught my attention was Buzz Machine by Jeff Jarvis, which evolved out of his dramatic story of escaping from the World Trade Center disaster. My passion for blogs reminds me of my passion for the Internet back in 1992-93–I wasn’t one of the first people to discover the possibilities of the web, but I was on the early arc of the curve when it came to the mass market.
I remember how much there was to read and to learn in those days, and how I struggled to catch up to everyone else I admired. SGML, HTML, gopher trees, perl, pine…I was consumed with all the tools that helped build the communications platform I found so fascinating. When the web hit, I launched one of the first commercial web sites for consumers–The Scholastic Network for Scholastic, a kids and school publishing company.
Now I feel like I am in a similar position with blogging. I am so into the concept of social networks and the social web (have been for a while), am fascinating by RSS, and eager to see blogs become available as tools for more people. Today I discovered something that probably all the cool people in the blogging world are already taking for granted–the amazing work being done by phil pearson. Wow! This guy has done some great stuff!
He started the Internet Topic Exchange which is a database or taxonomy of the blogging world, similar to The Open Directory Project (I know everyone who is not techie is scratching their heads as they read this, sorry).
Also, the remarkable Blogging Ecosystem, which tracks how blogs are linked together, including this one.