Little Things about the Blogosphere I love

Yeah, yeah, “blogosphere” is so 2005. I’m posting this as a “page”; hopefully I’ll continue to update it as stuff strikes my fancy.

1. The way you can tell when someone’s done a major overhaul on their page as their count in your aggregator (Bloglines for me) jumps up to 10 posts in a day as their feed is republished. Kind of incentive to stop by their actual URL to see who’s just gotten a new host, new software, new book, or just been bitten by the creative bug.
2. The way aggregators have completely changed the way we interpret someone’s site. Some of my favorite bloggers have plain old MSN Spaces or Blogger pages using stock templates – it’s ideas and information that matter in the RSS world, not flash. Not that good page design is necessarily wasted time.
3. Post from anywhere, anytime. I need to use my cell phone and Odeo more. There’s just something cool about removing the self-censorship barriers that we can generate in the 15 minutes between having an idea and actually sitting down to write about it.
4. The complete and total lack of adequate language to describe what is going on. Is it “the blogosphere”, “new media”, “self publishing”, “Web 2.0”? Moblogging? Audioblogging? Podcasting? Videocasting? What it is is the seeds of a potential re-ordering of information flow, from plain old “push/pull” to more of a “graze”. The lack of words in the common vernacular to describe it is the surest sign that there’s something new to it.
5. That my kids are still confused with both commercials, or the idea that we can’t watch something on TV because “it’s not on now.” That, thanks to the internet, a new coloring page, or a picture to cut and paste on a school project is just a search and a “print” away. That we spent 10 minutes explaining a pay phone to Jake the last time we were in an airport. That wires are mainly devices to put power into batteries. That it’s perfectly normal to hear and talk to a relative in the Ukraine just ’cause daddy’s laptop is in the room.