Article Relates Weblogging to Other Technology-Driven Trends and "Amateurization"
Dave Aiello wrote, "One of the longer, more thought-provoking, and link-filled articles that I've read recently has been published by Tom Coates on plasticbag.org. In (Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything, Coates goes a long way toward explaining how weblogging tools dramatically increase the ability of individuals and organizations to inexpensively create structured document repositories."
"Weblogging tools have not only succeeded in providing a well-understood means of adding new content to a web site, they have also given rise to a series of best practices that revolve around site layout and organization. Over the last two years, many people have reorganized web sites into a weblog format that lists the highlights of recently-created site content in reverse chronological order. This form of organization was found to work well with search engines like Google, but also gave rise to a host of information discovery tools that feed off the weblog infrastructure (such as Weblogs.com, Blogdex, and Technorati)."
"This article relates the development of weblog publishing systems to other revolutionary, computer-based knowledge creation tools that were perfected earlier: word processing and desktop publishing. It also correctly points out that the evolution of each of these publishing toolsets eventually led to an increased level of knowledge of their efficient uses. The ad hoc support communities that sprang up around word processing, desktop publishing, and weblogging led to an almost Darwinian evolution of state-of-the-art uses for each of them."