Unsurprisingly, the Web itself is a frequent focus of much weblog activity, from Peter Merholz's Peterme.com (with the emphasis on interface design) to Paul Kedrosky's Grok Soup (Internet finance) to Dave Winer's Scripting News (coding issues). If you follow any of these sites over a period of time, you get to know the enthusiasms of their proprietors, along with their blind spots. You can see what the Web world looks like through their eyes -- and figure out where you trust them and where you don't.

There are all sorts of hybrids of the weblog format. For one thing, a weblog makes a great e-mail newsletter, and some weblog operators bundle their links into daily mailings. At the popular "news for nerds" site Slashdot, links are posted by a cadre of regulars and each new link provides the starting point for a bulletin-board discussion. The San Jose Mercury News has been running its own technology news weblog called Good Morning Silicon Valley for several years now. The Mercury News' page is intended to be an informal tip sheet to interesting technology news around the Net, and it fills that role well; but more recently, it's been dominated by what seems like an increasingly higher percentage of links to the Mercury's own stories.

Commercial Web outfits -- particularly those that are primarily in the "content" business, like the Mercury -- tend to be wary and suspicious of providing too many links beyond their own pages. They ask, "Why should we send our readers away?" That's a short-sighted and ultimately self-defeating way of thinking, though: A weblog that's mostly a table of contents for a single Web site is going to lack the variety of one that casts a wider net, and in the end it will fail to build the regular and growing following that the for-profit owner seeks.

Weblogs aren't exactly a new phenomenon: Justin Hall's long-running Web diary has always been a link list as well; Matt Drudge's Drudge Report would be a weblog if Drudge were a more interesting and self-revealing writer. But over the past year weblogs have become a lot more common -- in part because the software to maintain them has become a little more easy for writers to set up. That process is likely to accelerate: Dave Winer, whose Frontier software is used by many weblog pioneers, is busy developing new programs for Web writers that will let them build and update sites directly from their browsers, without needing to bother with file uploads.

Of course, a weblog is useless unless there's somewhere for its links to point. The emergence of weblogs doesn't eclipse the importance of timely news and entertainment on the Web -- if anything, it enhances the value of such original content. Mostly, it's a sign that we're only beginning to discover the best tools and strategies for helping Web users cope with the vast media terrain we all now inhabit. The webloggers have found a new and fertile niche in the Web's information ecology. They're fulfilling the predictions by Internet visionaries of the rise of a new breed of personal journalism online -- only instead of pounding the physical pavement, they forage for news on the Net itself.

This is the sort of thing that gets some journalists riled up. "Reporting isn't just finding links!" they cry. "It's interviewing people. Checking sources. Digging for the truth."

To which the only sane answer is: of course. No one's suggesting that weblogs are any sort of replacement for the old-fashioned virtues of good journalism. But the defensive hostility of some journalists does make you think a bit about how much today's "professional" media are already behaving like the link-happy new medium they fear. After all, magazines and TV stations pick up most of their stories from newspapers. Newspapers troll the Web for gossip and leads. The press became a giant echo chamber long ago; the Net just boosted the volume and cranked up the speed. The big difference between online and offline news is that the offline press will "pick up" a story without bothering to credit it -- let alone link you to the original source.

So the next time you hear reporters sniffing about "linkalists," ask them just what their beef is with links, anyway -- most likely, the problem is in their heads. As Dave Winer put it when I called him up to talk about weblogs, "Any time a conventional journalist looks down their nose at me, I know I'm doing the right thing."
salon.com | May 28, 1999

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