Clay Shirky writes on the potential impact of AOl unleashing blogging to its 30+ million users:
I’m betting on a combination, where most AOL users cluster; where they have have connections to a few of the current highest ranked weblogs, pushing them still further up the charts; and where they place some of their own most popular users and sites among the Top 100.
This is the same pattern we had with the web itself, where most early websites spent alot of time explaining what the web was. Later, when we’d soaked in it long enough, the web became a tool for pages about other things. Displacement but not disruption, in other words, with less popularity for the bloggers-blogging-about-blogging, and more for the InstaPundits and Talking Points of the world.
Jeff Jarvis provided a preview of AOL Journals, which will be released later in the year.
