Three things I wrote ages ago on weblogs, publishing and community…

For a variety of reasons I’ve been digging up some old stuff on the publishing of weblogs that I’ve written on this site of for conferences or whatever, and I thought I’d reference them again here because I was surprised by how much I still agree with them (and how much they’re still relevant) even though they’re a couple of years old:

• Some ways that mainstream web media can interact with the “revolution” in personal publishingÖ (Powerpoint – 3Mb-ish)
  “Rather than treating weblogs as an object to be studied or as a territory to be claimed, mainstream publishers should be looking to build tools that increase interaction between the two types of site – making both better in the processÖ

• On super-distributed and
  super-localised online communities (Powerpoint – 5Mb-ish)
  “The weblog world is a super-distributed community where – much like newspaper columnists – there are ongoing and involved discussions and conversations happening not on one site – but distributed across many hundreds of thousands of sites, each one radically personalised – a representation of its creator in cyberspaceÖ”
• Why Content Publishers shouldn’t host weblogs (February 2003)
  “There is no reason to assume that being in the position to encourage the take-up of weblogging will mean that you’ll keep the ones you want to keep using your service. In fact: 1. The longer someone has been weblogging, and the more invested they are in it, the more likely it is that they’re going to want to get a domain name of their own. 2. These same people are also likely to want to use extended functionality at some point and will probably try and move to a dedicated application or provider who can more adequately fulfil their weblogging needs. 3. A dedicated long-term weblogger may not wish to be associated with the brand of your service any more and may choose to leave.”