Interview with pb
The most informative person I interviewed for this article was Paul Bausch, a free-lance web developer who lives in Corvallis and publishes a blog called OnFocus.
He actually used to be part of a company called Pyra, which created the Blogger program back in 1999. I was amazed that I found one of the three people who was in on that, living here in the mid-valley.
We met at Creekside Coffee last week and talked for about an hour.
Some things I did not have room to include in the article were some of his thoughts on blogging in general, and the future of blogging. So here's my summation of that part of our conversation:
Paul said he thinks that one of blogging's biggest contributions to the online world is permalinks. If I understand what he explained to me, online links like the ones I'm putting in my blog here now have their own urls, specific to that particular post. Back in the day, you didn't have those, and once something got moved off of that site's main page and into an archived page, those links were lost. Now they are permanent.
Another interesting tidbit from the life of a guy who is very tuned to the online world: Paul says doesn't tend to get his news from traditional media sites. Instead, he reads lots of other people's blogs, and things of interest bubble up to the surface that way because he's seeing what other people are talking about. I can't say I was happy to hear that, being employed in the traditional media. Our company is having lots of discussions right now about the fact that people aged 18-24 (and I would suspect older than that, too, up to 30-35) don't read the newspaper.
He also told me about something RSS. This is a way to increase the number of blogs you can consume, he told me. It functions, if I understood him right, like an old-fashioned news clipping service. You tell the service what subjects you are interested in (for instance, Iraq, bin Laden, terrorism, just to pick a few topics of current interest), and then the RSS service will inform you when other bloggers are writing about those topics
Google has a similar service in their news alerts, which I have used when reporting about particular stories and I want to see what other media outlets are writing about the same subject, and I've find it to be very helpful. I haven't tried out the RSS thing yet or even learned anything more about it beyond my conversation with Paul, but it sounds interesting.
I asked Paul what people look for in a blog, and he said that he thinks people like them because there is no mediation. You're not hearing something through the filter of an established newspaper or a corporate machine--you're hearing one guy's opinion, unvarnished. He said he thinks there is a distrust of the big media and a sense that bloggers are more trustworthy because they are not in it for the money.
He told me about one guy, who writes a blog called Portland Communique, who considers blogging his full time job. Paul said he goes to city council meetings, etc., and reports on what he says, as an independent voice.
He also mentioned that OregonLive.com is getting people who live in different areas of Portland to start blogs on Oregonlive to write about what is going on in their neighborhoods.
He said this actually concerns him a little, as he could see a class of "unpaid reporters" developing. Maybe.
I think this type of blogging is actually really intriguing. I heard an interview with Bill Moyers on NPR where he compared bloggers to the independent operators of printing presses around the time of the American Revolutionary War--independent people getting their voices out in their own way, and I think I agree.
He said: "I think the internet, the blogging, is the closest we've come in a long time to the history of the American media in the beginning. You know in the 1820's, 1830's all you needed to be a journalist was to buy a press. That's why they called them inkstained wretches. Because they operated their own hand presses. For a little bit of money, like Tom Payne and others, you could have your own press. ....... After the revolution independent journalists, printers they called themselves, sprung up all over the country ... they were partisan by the way, vociferously. They attacked the others politics. but it was a healthy period of bombast in america in which people could sort out the information. I think the bloggers, then the websites, come closest to the spirit of cacophany, to that democratic expression, that we had in the early part of this country's history."
He actually used to be part of a company called Pyra, which created the Blogger program back in 1999. I was amazed that I found one of the three people who was in on that, living here in the mid-valley.
We met at Creekside Coffee last week and talked for about an hour.
Some things I did not have room to include in the article were some of his thoughts on blogging in general, and the future of blogging. So here's my summation of that part of our conversation:
Paul said he thinks that one of blogging's biggest contributions to the online world is permalinks. If I understand what he explained to me, online links like the ones I'm putting in my blog here now have their own urls, specific to that particular post. Back in the day, you didn't have those, and once something got moved off of that site's main page and into an archived page, those links were lost. Now they are permanent.
Another interesting tidbit from the life of a guy who is very tuned to the online world: Paul says doesn't tend to get his news from traditional media sites. Instead, he reads lots of other people's blogs, and things of interest bubble up to the surface that way because he's seeing what other people are talking about. I can't say I was happy to hear that, being employed in the traditional media. Our company is having lots of discussions right now about the fact that people aged 18-24 (and I would suspect older than that, too, up to 30-35) don't read the newspaper.
He also told me about something RSS. This is a way to increase the number of blogs you can consume, he told me. It functions, if I understood him right, like an old-fashioned news clipping service. You tell the service what subjects you are interested in (for instance, Iraq, bin Laden, terrorism, just to pick a few topics of current interest), and then the RSS service will inform you when other bloggers are writing about those topics
Google has a similar service in their news alerts, which I have used when reporting about particular stories and I want to see what other media outlets are writing about the same subject, and I've find it to be very helpful. I haven't tried out the RSS thing yet or even learned anything more about it beyond my conversation with Paul, but it sounds interesting.
I asked Paul what people look for in a blog, and he said that he thinks people like them because there is no mediation. You're not hearing something through the filter of an established newspaper or a corporate machine--you're hearing one guy's opinion, unvarnished. He said he thinks there is a distrust of the big media and a sense that bloggers are more trustworthy because they are not in it for the money.
He told me about one guy, who writes a blog called Portland Communique, who considers blogging his full time job. Paul said he goes to city council meetings, etc., and reports on what he says, as an independent voice.
He also mentioned that OregonLive.com is getting people who live in different areas of Portland to start blogs on Oregonlive to write about what is going on in their neighborhoods.
He said this actually concerns him a little, as he could see a class of "unpaid reporters" developing. Maybe.
I think this type of blogging is actually really intriguing. I heard an interview with Bill Moyers on NPR where he compared bloggers to the independent operators of printing presses around the time of the American Revolutionary War--independent people getting their voices out in their own way, and I think I agree.
He said: "I think the internet, the blogging, is the closest we've come in a long time to the history of the American media in the beginning. You know in the 1820's, 1830's all you needed to be a journalist was to buy a press. That's why they called them inkstained wretches. Because they operated their own hand presses. For a little bit of money, like Tom Payne and others, you could have your own press. ....... After the revolution independent journalists, printers they called themselves, sprung up all over the country ... they were partisan by the way, vociferously. They attacked the others politics. but it was a healthy period of bombast in america in which people could sort out the information. I think the bloggers, then the websites, come closest to the spirit of cacophany, to that democratic expression, that we had in the early part of this country's history."
3 comments:
The underlying "aha!" of the permalink is that with its development the discrete components of the Web no longer were entire pages, but individual pieces of information. Technically, that had always existed through the use of anchor tags, but the permalinks brought to the Web through the arrival of weblogs made such narrow linking ubiquitous.
“We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.”
- Herman Melville
RSS is the way of the Future...
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