Scripting News: John Perry Barlow greeted me here at the TTI conference. We chatted a bit. He asked what I’m doing at Berkman (where he is also a fellow). “Starting lots of weblogs,” I said. He said he thought weblogs are like poetry when he was in college, lots of people writing, very few people reading. I hear stuff like that all the time, often from people like Barlow who are accomplished writers in other media. It’s not really a valid comparison. Much weblog writing is functional, not artistic. Jon Udell, below, writes about SpiderPhone because he wants to tell you about a piece of technology that interests him. The writing helps him sort it out, even if no one were to read it. Other examples, a weblog for a class, a weblog for a patient in a hospital. These are utilitarian things, they simply facilitate a higher level of communication. Instead of comparing it to poetry, compare it to something more prosaic, like a telephone, but of course weblog-writing is different from communicating using a telephone.

Yup. I’m writing this weblog not so much to communicate with others, but to communicate with myself days, months, years down the road, when I can’t remember the specifics of something I read or what I thought about it though I can remember that I read it and thought something about it. Familiar?