Weblog Hype

In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.
-- Gore Vidal

Thursday, November 4, 1999

Jack has decided (at least I think it's decided) to go for a web hosting solution using Zope instead of me getting DSL at my place. It's quite a bit cheaper, and he'll get to play with Linux and Python. I haven't managed to get my password to work on the server yet, but I'm sure we'll sort it out soon. Then I'll get my own domain and start the process of moving most of this stuff!

At work I've been plugging along on Java, when not involved in other website issues. I was very pleased this afternoon -- I managed to figure out how to compile the source code for one of our applets. I needed to do this so that we'll be able to maintain them, now that the developer who created them for us has moved on to other things. The interactive charts we have are actually one of the few useful things I've seen done in Java!

Lots of activity on the weblogs mailing list this week. We are a diverse group, with different goals and degrees of net.fame. This can lead to communication difficulties! Dave Winer has a vision for his site and a network of weblogs -- others of us are baffled. "Weblogs at the Cusp of Acceptance" but I've never felt not accepted. Anita's LOL isn't as ambitious as some weblogs; I don't cover the news or tech issues, much. But of course I'd love to have everyone reading the page, and this journal, too! There's been some discussion on Pamie's forum about how many readers are too many. I certainly haven't hit that level yet!

The weblog hype does seem to get some folks all het up. There was an interesting thread started by Gabby on the Metajournals forum (her orginal subject line was "weblogs are evil"!), but unfortunately it got deleted and had to restart. Hard to argue with posts that don't exist anymore! I don't think the original was backed up before Gabby expunged it (accidentally). This is a disadvantage of a strictly web-based forum! If we'd been discussing something in email or in a regular Usenet newsgroup, those posts could be recovered from sent mail or elsewhere in the news feed (Usenet is made for asynchronous networks) but a forum thread is only as reliable as the server it's on.