26 November, 2005

Starless Night

Cold. Black. Starless night.

The first of Advent is tomorrow, though the Christmas Market started yesterday. This old Unesco city sets a magnificent stage for such celebrations. It also means that those of us who live on the island must crab-walk through the crowds for the next four weeks.

Read an article in the New York Times today. Even the title, “As Corporate Ad Money Flows Their Way, Bloggers Risk Their Rebel Reputation “, made me want to wince. What rebel reputation? Maybe Ms. Story should first go back a few decades to the founding of the telephone.

The telephone was initially an alternative to the telegraph: purely a means of information exchange. It took all those women working in the post offices to transform an information device into a communication device. It was this shift in content which started a revolution.

The same revolution, not an act of rebellion, has been happening for the last two years in the Internet, driven partly by bloggers and podcasters. The times of rebel or cowboy bloggers have long gone. Journalists, politicians, educators, parents, lovers, priests, and even, yikes, lawyers are using blogs these days. The fact that some of the bloggers have found schemes to earn money doing this seems very secondary.

(This post is part of my "Growing Up & Growing Old" project.)

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