I ran across Start-up marries blogs and camera phones on Eszter's Blog Entry: "Mobile blogging.. any blogging?" (01/13/2003) and ended up at Slashdot | Blogging With Camera Phones. I think that Eszter's comments were great. Mostly that the Slashers are complaining about bloggers, but really do the same thing, except that they do it in a famous place, and therefore are more cooler. But I thought that this thought was strange, "Yes, there may be lots of blogs out there that are truly about nothing more than what someone had for breakfast or what the weather was like in their town today, but if that's all some people see in blogs then they are really missing out."

If we're sociologists, aren't we more interested in what people do, rather than deciding what it of value and what isn't? I rant a lot about finding it much more interesting to read about the daily events in the life of a healthcare worker than a list of what papers Jason's published, or who some star had lunch with.

Back to the roots of the internet, and we're back to a bunch of people chatting with each other about things that interest them. I think it is the fact that most people complaining about how the net is used or not used now came onto the net after 1994 that leads them to think that it is about glitz and hype of interesting people doing interesting things with their lives and careers. Or zany d00ds who can titilate us with their antics.

Go back and have a look at Ed Krol's "The whole internet" 1992 edition, to see what was really there, and what people were doing. They were just chatting with eachother. Sharing bits of their day. Perhaps sharing some info that they had access to that might be of interest to others. I think that the net was closer to blogs in terms of how they were used, than they've been to much else since the advent of the first graphical web browser.

That said, I'll stop ranting except to say that Blogs seem to be about the individual, and most other online portals/slashydottythings/Usenet/edTech/CMC technologies are more about the collective. The latter focus on the location and topic of communication, and less on the reflective individual exploring issues and topics. And this exploration of diversity is interesting to me.