For long, our news and information has come from the standard news sources – papers, magazines, TV and more recently their websites. This, along with companies and many millions of home pages, created a vast web, with lots of information – and plenty of useless stuff too. Publishing and updating frequently on the web was not very easy, unless one had access to sophisticated content management software. The end result was that we stuck to a few websites we trusted and then used search engines to find specific information.
Step back a little and think about how information, analysis and opinions get generated. There are experts who know specific topics well. To create news stories, journalists talk to these experts, extract out the essence and use their branded publication which has wide reach to get this aggregation across – in print or via television. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get to the experts directly and read the raw, unedited version of what they had to say? Wouldn’t it be even better if the experts could reach us at all times with their opinions on news as it breaks? That is what blogs are about. Blogs help “domain specialists” form connections with interested readers.
Technology topics, not unsurprisingly, are a favourite among bloggers. Writes Carlye Adler in Fortune Small Business:
Tech “bloggers” (that’s really what they call themselves) are most often industry pros who keep their Weblog as a hobby-something to do at 2:40 a.m. While some of the sites offer straight tech news, most are sprinkled with a lot of personality, authoritative firsthand information, and fresh insights.
With so many tech magazines out of business (we’re not naming names), these e-newsletters, once solely for tech heads, are becoming mandatory information sources for the mainstream.
Here are some of my favourite blogs (with a strong technology bias):
Dave Winer’s . Dave is the founder of Userland, which makes blogging tools. Scripting.com is also one of the most popular blogs.
