Old Europe gets the blogging bug
"Siegeszug der Online-Journale" (Triumphal march of the online journals) was the heading on the article in yesterday's Financial Times Deutschland. The subhead on Konrad Lischka's comprehensive overview provided clarification for the mystified: "Weblogs, daily updated internet diaries, are becoming a mass phenomenon".
Those who didn't have a blog before reading Lischka's article will surely start one now. After all, Moby's got one and superstar sci-fi writer William Gibson's got one as well. It's hosted at Blogger, by the way, which has the advantage of being free. Could there be a better reason to surf a wave? Can't beat free.
To emphasize the point that this is more than a fad, Lischka focusses on the work of a trio of überbloggers: Andrew Sullivan, Dave Winer and Dan Gillmor, and he also looks at some of the services that have developed to pursue blog changes: Daypop, Blogdex and Blogtracker.
Is it all vanity and narcissism, he asks? It's the clich頱uestion in almost all articles that look at blogging, so Lischka can't be blamed for asking it again. To his credit, he doesn't dwell long on the amateur psychology, and he singles out Dan Gillmor as an example of a journalist who is soaring above all others in the tech field because of the tips readers of his blog provide.
Missing from the blogging picture until now have been German bloggers. But that's about to change says Lischka. Up in Hamburg, Stefan Gl䮺er and Stefan Wiskemann have started www.20six.de and they hope that their baby will be Old Europe's answer to Blogger. Why 20six? It's the number of letters in the Latin alphabet, the say, and that's all you need to make words dance. Their system is easy to use. Registration is straightforward (you must be over 14), the blogging interface is thorough and the templates offer cool design. Let's see if 20six can produce a counterweight to Instapundit. That will be the test. Eh?
Diarist of the day: Virginia Woolf, 13 March 1921"[T.S.] Eliot dines here tonight, alone, since his wife is in a nursing home, not much to our regret. But what about Eliot? Will he become 'Tom'? What happens with friendships undertaken at the age of forty? Do they flourish and live long? I suppose a good mind endures, and one is drawn to it, owning to having a good mind myself. Not that Tom admires my writing, damn him."
