I’d like to collect a selection of weblogging “manifestos” containing descriptions of what weblogging is supposed to be “for” and who webloggers are (not statistical surveys, but people’s views). I sense that there is a growing self-awareness from “a list” bloggers and an emergent notion of what weblogging is supposed to be about but I would like to trace its roots. Can any of my readers suggest a good way of collecting and analysing what has been said in a way that is ‘unbiased’?
I want to write about the documents I have found wearing my academic hat so I can’t just say ‘here are some interesting links that I found’ – I have to be able to claim that these are in some way representative – or preferably that these are the most influential. I tried typing ‘weblog manifesto’ into various weblogging search engines and didn’t get much back that was useful. Googling for ‘weblog manifesto’ found some interesting stuff (a “commercial blogging manifesto”:http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2003/02/26.html and a “Draft Manifesto for the Role of Weblogs in the Larger Society”:http://www.thesentimentalist.com/archives/000076.html), but I sense that the links I found were not the most influential either. I didn’t find the paper on “Emergent Democracy”:http://joi.ito.com/static/emergentdemocracy.html that way for example – and I imagine it has been influential (or at least the views of its writers have been). I would be interested in the most important “old media” writers about weblogging as well. Any ideas?
Is it beyond the wit of man to have a small “tooltip” type description appear when you hover over a link to a blog? Its beyond the wit of me but there are some really smart sods out there.
Cass
Comment by Cancergiggles — 6 April 2004 @ 9:53 am
The web page with instructions to do this is here:
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex5/dhtmltooltip.htm
Comment by David Brake — 6 April 2004 @ 10:54 am
Lilia Efimova and Ton Zijlstra have started a wiki of blog stories about how and why people blog http://www.zylstra.org/extra/wakka.php?wakka=BlogStories
Comment by David Wilcox — 6 April 2004 @ 11:12 am
Regarding influence: perhaps you could try technorati.com, Blogstreets or similar sites to get an idea of blog “rankings” and which ones are most widely read. Also, off the top of my head, try emailing a few web.gurus directly: Rebecca Blood, Brad Graham, Halcyon, Powazek, Matt Haughey. Those folks are friendly and helpful and knowledgeable, and very interested in meta-blogging issues. (Disclosure: I know Brad personally, the others only by reputation.)
Comment by sennoma — 6 April 2004 @ 5:33 pm
I loved headmap’s “Declaration of Interdependence” –
http://www.headmap.org/archives/000145.html
Comment by Seb — 16 April 2004 @ 6:25 pm